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Contingency, Cultivation, and Choice: The Garden Ethic in Prodigal Summer Priscilla Leder arbara Kingsolver responds to a reader’s question about how to read her most recent novel, Prodigal Summer: “I’d ask you to read slowly; this is the most challenging book I’ve ever given my readers. . . . My agenda is to lure you into thinking about whole systems, not just individual parts. . . . Notice the sentence that begins and ends the book: ‘Solitude is only a human presumption’” (“FAQ”). The novel brings to life the Appalachian ecosystem of Zebulon mountain and creates its own system by interweaving three stories of people enmeshed in systems of their own—the ranger who tends the mountain and the hunter who invades it; a chestnut breeder and an apple farmer, aging neighbors who quarrel about propriety and pesticides; and an entomologist struggling to adjust to life as a farmer’s widow. All of these characters presume themselves to be solitary in some sense, yet each emerges from solitude as the story unfolds. Kingsolver believes her American audience is unaccustomed to thinking in terms of systems. “The story asks for a broader grasp of connections and interdependencies than is usual in our culture” (“FAQ”). Readers who meet the novel’s challenge to think systemically are ready to ponder the other sentence that begins and ends Prodigal Summer: “Every choice is a world made new for the chosen” (1, 444). As Kingsolver’s characters move from solitude toward connection , as biological creatures and as conscious, thinking beings, they demonstrate the difficulty and the necessity of choices made in and through an awareness of “whole systems.” Peter Wenz maintains that Prodigal Summer expresses the “land ethic” articulated by Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac. A land ethic, Leopold declared, “changes B Priscilla Leder 234 the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such” (204). Wenz demonstrates in detail the correspondences between Kingsolver’s systems and Leopold’s land community. With the similarities established, Wenz goes on to compare the two works as environmental rhetoric and finds Prodigal Summer more effective . “Because readers often assimilate views more easily when associ ating those views with identifiable people and personalities, Kingsolver’s exposition of environmental conflicts has a pedagogical advantage over Leopold’s” (122) Wenz sees character as an effective means to lure the reader into thinking about systems, but some reviewers of Prodigal Summer focus on people and personalities while criticizing the lessons they present. For instance, Jeff Giles of Newsweek finds the ending “suddenly and unexpectedly touching” but complains that the “fierce-minded female characters” who “stand in for the author” are “almost always smart and right” in the mini-lectures they deliver to the men (82). Reviews by Paul Gray and Jennifer Schuessler offer similar criticisms, finding the characters engaging but their message too heavy-handed. Reviewers such as these have the wrong approach, according to Kingsolver: “Several reviewers have completely missed what the book is about, because they paid no attention to anything beyond the human plot on the shallowest level. This novel is not exclusively—or even mainly—about humans” (“FAQ”). Writers of short reviews like those cited above may lack the space or the inclination to focus on anything other than “the human plot on the shallowest level.” But even the thoughtful readers that Kingsolver hopes to foster through her suggestions will understandably identify with the human characters —that’s how people read novels, after all. By reading “the human plot” beyond “the shallowest level” to examine how those characters think and act within that system, readers can learn to consider their own actions. As the novel unfolds, the characters learn and develop through delicate, nuanced negotiations—with each other, between their own biology and their consciousness, and between themselves and their environment, making new worlds with every choice. To better understand the distinction between a superficial emphasis on the human plot and an understanding of that plot as a narrative of characters making considered choices in and through their connection to the 235 Contingency, Cultivation, and Choice system, we can examine the work’s much-discussed emphasis on sexuality. Each of the three interwoven plots incorporates the teeming fecundity of the Appalachian summer: The chestnut farmer Garnett Walker experiences a dream about his neighbor Nannie Rawley “so real that he’d awakened plagued with the condition he...

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