Bean attire to pass out fliers advocating a sustainability pledge no one in Feathertown can possibly follow: “Switch some of your stocks and mutual funds to socially responsible investments.”
More than anything, it’s the not-subtle condescension of “Flight Behavior” that strips the work of artistic weight.Ĭonsider Kingsolver’s description of a local named “Dimmit Slaughter,” who rides up the mountain on his Harley to look at the butterflies: “his T-shirt stretched to within an inch of its life across his broad belly, where the letters distorted outward like horror movie credits.”ĭimmit is one of a series of “hick” caricatures who share a stage with a series of equally stereotypical Blue Staters, including a man named Leighton Atkins who arrives in L.L.
“The heels of her oxblood boots struck the waxed floor loudly,” Kingsolver writes when Dellarobia enters a church, “advertising her traveling whereabouts like a GPS.” The writing is often turgid and peppered with mixed metaphors and sloppy similes. With “Flight Behavior,” however, Kingsolver appears to be turning her back on serious literary aspirations. Over the course of a career with several bestsellers, including “The Poisonwood Bible,” Kingsolver has built a reputation as a skilled novelist unafraid to tackle issues of inequality and cultural conflict. Her friend Dovey is another Blue Stater at heart: She works at a grocery store meat counter and cringes when she sees people “with ‘heart attack’ written all over their faces” buying bacon. She’s trying to shake loose from the roots of her lethargic culture. Dellarobia, whose dreams of leaving Feathertown to go to college were thwarted by a teen pregnancy, is her Blue State-thinking stand-in. Kingsolver, who was raised in nearby Kentucky, spends much of the 400-plus pages of this book wagging her finger at poor white people. But after just a chapter or two, the novel’s true purpose becomes clear - it’s a Blue State morality tale about Red State people and Red State thinking.
A strong female protagonist with a complicated recent past, for example, and extended, dreamy descriptions of a shifting natural landscape.
“Flight Behavior” has many of the trappings of a work of literary fiction. “The whole earth, if you want to know,” she says. “They said it means something’s really gone wrong,” she tells her husband, Cub. When a group of lepidopterists alights in Feathertown, Dellarobia learns the dark secret behind the appearance of those millions of feathery creatures.
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