Hungry for the World: A Memoir by Kim Barnes (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 2 7 9 Hungry for the World: A Memoir. By Kim Barnes. New York: Random House, 2000. 241 pages, $23.00/ $13.00. Reviewed by Brenda Miller Western Washington University, Bellingham Early in October, I sat with my friend Ruth as she labored to deliver her first child. I’ve known Ruth a long time, and whenever she’s in pain, or just needs comfort, I read aloud to her, the rhythm of the written word the only suitable anodyne. So, in the lull between contractions, I pulled from my back­ pack the book currently absorbing my attention: Kim Barnes’s Hungry for the World, the sequel to the author’s memoir of growing up in a Pentecostal family in the backwoods of Idaho. I opened it and began reading to Ruth this female coming of age story, the struggles of a young woman not only to divorce her­ self from the constrictions of family but to redefine herself as an adult woman in relationship to the world. That world, for Barnes, is beset with men, and though she has ostensibly broken free of her father’s ruling hand, she still finds herself continually mirrored inside a man’s gaze. Barnes is not a conventional woman— in this book she hunts and fishes, cleans her guns and drives trucks— but this story seems the nanative of an arche­ typal woman’s quest. Set against the conflicting backdrops of rural Lewiston, the gritty streets of downtown Seattle, and the Idaho wilderness for which Barnes still yearns, her story is one of a lost daughter who wanders in a land riddled with dan­ ger. She becomes involved with a succession of men, each more dangerous than the last, and pulls herself back at last from the brink of physical and emotional devastation. Is this a western tale, the heroine saving herself through the power of her own gumption? I don’t think so. Barnes never aggrandizes herself into the role of heroine, but the western landscape plays a vital role in her redemption. In the end it seems impossible for her tale to have played out anywhere else. My friend gave birth to a daughter, Naomi, after three days of labor. I read to her only snippets of Hungry for the World; my voice, empowered by Barnes’s strong rhythmic prose, helped carry Ruth through the difficult delivery. My only regret is that she never got to hear the profound close to Barnes’s memoir. I would like to have read aloud those scenes grounded in a house overlooking the Clear­ water River, the daughter reflecting back on her life from the quiet serenity of a home she has made for herself, couched in the steady comfort of husband and children. I would like Ruth to have heard about how the father drives his lum­ ber truck on the winding road below Barnes’s house. “It is a dangerous road,” Barnes writes, “one he cannot take his eyes from. He raises his hand anyway, in case I am watching, and in that small, transitory gesture is an acknowledgment of connection, of faith in the air that binds us” (239). I would like Ruth, and her new daughter, to know about this kind of familial connection. I would like to bless them this way, with the power of Barnes’s words. But, as Barnes’s memoir shows us, every woman must eventually bestow these blessings on herself. ...