I’ve written before about the importance of imagination for writers. The fundamental importance. I was delighted by Barbara Kingsolver’s as I read her new Flight Behavior. (As I’m writing this, two orange butterflies – not monarchs, but fritillaries which have a predilection for laying their eggs in the scarlet passion vines which almost completely surround my house – are dancing like twin stars, but too quickly to photograph.)

“Dellarobia [she was named], like the wreath in the magazine. Not a biblical heroine, just a steady buildup of odds and ends.”

“Not that tour guide was a career option for Dellarobia, they wouldn’t let her show up wearing a toddler as a pendant and a kindergartner for a shin guard.” (She’s a girl who started having kids before she could start college.)

“His mustache made two curved lines around the sides of his mouth like parentheses, as if everything he might say would be very quiet, and incidental.”

“she’d Google it? It sounded ghoulish, like voyeurism. Which, to be honest, was what the daily news amounted to.”

“So there were worse things than feeding meatloaf to a vegetarian. Like blabbing wiki-facts to the person who probably discovered [the monarch’s behavior] in the first place.”

“She’d tried to get her dressed, but the child had pelted her all morning with a hail of no; she felt like a person stoned for the sin of motherhood.”

“The impending loan was a balloon, and that name was not apt, for something that weighed enough to crush a family.”

About a Christmas ornament in a dollar-store: “there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy and use up, living their lives mostly to cancel each other out. A worldwide entrapment of bottom feeders.”

Dellarobia “dug in the junk drawers, trying to locate her nerve. Somewhere between outrage and giving up, that was where she found it.”

“some year-end conspiracy of alleged joy and goodwill arriving from heaven with no hard currency as backup.”

Of her husband: “Irony would never be Cub’s strong suit, but religious blasphemy he could probably pick out of a lineup.”

She and her kindergartner “stood facing east, the direction from which the bus would come, along with the light of morning in its own good time.”

Turning “over every conversation … furtive and miserable, like handling gritty coins at the bottom of a purse.”

“Her skin was the brown color of winter pasture, her face a mysterious clause between the commas of long gold earrings; a completely impossible person to see …”

“She’d forgotten she ever planted those [hyacinths]. Their snub green leaf bundles had looked to her like the beaks of turtles rising from an underworld.”

I don’t love Flight Behavior, though she has succeeded in writing a novel that is engaging and instructional, intertwining an imagined scenario of global warming with the life of a young woman in isolated Appalachia. The personal story and the fate of the migrating monarch butterflies unfold in tandem – successfully. Great structure, some great writing, terrific insights sometimes stunningly communicated like the quotes above. As I look at these disparate sentences out of context, I can see how brilliantly she has conveyed the daily life of a soul dropped into the wrong, but very well delineated life. And Kingsolver’s capacity to write third person narrative as if it were being told by the character – with all the eccentric perceptions and cultural peculiarities – generates an engrossing sense of the era, the landscape, and the interpersonal and intercultural prejudices.

But as a professional editor, I never would have let it go off to her publisher with so many inconsistencies in the style. I would love to have the opportunity to sit down with her writing and brush out every kink, bramble, and bit of crushed leaf – as her character might from the fleeces after shearing. But the first question I would ask this author (normally it would be: who is your audience, but we know Kingsolver’s audience) is: What flavor do you want to leave on the reader’s tongue? What do you want the very last paragraph to do to them? Yes, you want to educate about the threat of global warming, and that’s noble and you’ve done it well. But I’m referring to something more subtle: when the reader turns off the light at night, what do you want her to be mulling/feeling/dreaming in that sub-intellectual soft space of consciousness? This is where I think she failed.

The themes of a world ending in fire and flood are too grossly portrayed in the final scene. The heroine completed her transformation and recommitment a few pages earlier – but now she is observing the world from too far a distance. I wanted to be left with something intimate with her – perhaps hanging her oversize husband’s stretched underpants on the line knowing it’s going to be the last time she’s that close to those genitals that kept her from college in the first place.

The problem with the endings of commercially published books is that the staff editor must look at the generic market and try to predict what the buyer will want. I confess, I’m delighted to work with clients who are going to self-publish just so they can protect their own insight.

I may not love the book, but I highly recommend it.

Until next time, delight in the process.

Download PDF:  DCC_Imagination