Read or Die: Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver
In my Read or Die series of posts, I recommend fiction and nonfiction books that I believe have something vitally important to tell us about current events and the world we live in.
In the days since the disheartening end to a vicious presidential election cycle, I have seen many people — liberal pundits and lay social-media commentators alike — grapple with the results and their implications about our national character. How can we have called it so wrong? they ask. Why were so many people willing to vote for such a horrid man?
If that sounds like you, then you should read Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior between calls to your congressional representatives, or to pass the time while Occupying the public venue of your choice. It might help you to better understand the motivations of those Southern, Midwestern, and Rust-Belt white Americans who chose to wear ‘deplorable’ as a badge of honor.
This novel, set in the Appalachia that Kingsolver calls home, follows one Dellarobia Turnbow as she stumbles upon a wintering colony of monarch butterflies in the mountains behind her husband’s family farm. As news of this colony spreads, her family and neighbors tend to view this event as a miraculous sign from God, scientific observers view it as fallout from climate change, and the news media plays both sides for sensationalism. Dellarobia herself struggles to fit this event into her own understanding of the world as she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Dr. Ovid Byron, an entomologist who comes to study the monarch colony and hires Dellarobia as an assistant.
It is this working relationship between Dellarobia and Ovid, each trying to probe and make sense of the other’s worldview, that I keep coming back to now as I grapple with my own Trump-voting family and neighbors. How people weigh information differently, based on their own experiences and priorities and identities. Here’s a long conversation between them, one of my favorite excerpts:
“That is a concern of conscience,” he said. “Not of biology. Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.”
“That must be why people don’t like it,” she said, surprised at her tartness.
Ovid, too, seemed startled. “They don’t like science?”
“I’m sorry. I’m probably speaking out of turn here. You’ve explained to me how big this is. The climate thing. That it’s taking out stuff we’re counting on. But other people say just forget it. My husband, guys on the radio. They say it’s not proven.”
“What we’re discussing is clear and present, Dellarobia. Scientists agree on that. These men on the radio, I assume, are nonscientists. Why would people buy snake oil when they want medicine?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You guys aren’t popular. Maybe your medicine’s too bitter. Or you’re not selling to us. Maybe you’re writing us off, thinking we won’t get it. You should start with kindergartners and work your way up.”
“It’s too late for that. Believe me.”
“Don’t say that, ‘too late.’ I hate that. I’ve got my kids to think about.”
Ovid nodded slowly. “We were not always unpopular. Scientists.”
“Herbert Hoover was one! I read that.” Preston’s encyclopedia had already made it to show-and-tell. Flying Ants were making the rounds.
Ovid seemed the smallest bit amused. “I meant more recently than Herbert Hoover. Fifteen years ago people knew about global warming, at least in a general way, you know? In surveys, they would all answer, Yes, it exists, it’s a problem. Conservatives or liberals, exactly the same. Now there is a divide.”
“Well yeah. People sort themselves out. Like kids in a family, you know. They have to stake out their different territories. The teacher’s pet or the rascal.”
“You think so, it’s a territory divide? We have sorted ourselves as the calm, educated science believers and the scrappy, hotheaded climate deniers?”
Dellarobia definitely felt he was stacking one side of the deck with the sensible cards. Where did wild-haired girls knitting butterflies in the woods fit into that scheme?
“I’d say the teams get picked, and then the beliefs get handed around,” she said. “Team camo, we get the right to bear arms and John Deere and the canning jars and tough love and taking care of our own. The other side wears I don’t know what, something expensive. They get recycling and population control and lattes and as many second chances as anybody wants. Students e-mailing you to tell you they deserve their A’s.”
Ovid looked stupefied. “What, you’re saying this is some kind of contest between the peasant class and the gentry?”
She returned his look. “I definitely don’t think I said that.”
“Something like it. One of your teams has all the skills for breaking the frontier. And the other seems to be nursing a restive society society that grows in the wake of the plow.”
“Huh,” she said.
“But would you not agree, the frontiers of this world are already broken?”
“I guess. Maybe. Well, no. It depends.”
“Really?”
“Well, yeah. If it’s true what you’re saying. That this whole crapload is going to blow. Then what, we start over?”
Ovid said nothing. She knew she’d crossed a line of disrespect, putting it that way. This was like church to him, or children. The thing that kept him awake at night. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just saying. The environment got assigned to the other team. Worries like that are not for people like us. So says my husband.”
His brow wrinkled gravely. “Drought and floods are not worries for farmers?”
“You think any of this is based on information? Come on, who really chooses?”
“Information is all we have.” Ovid stared at her, somehow managing to look as naked as she’d ever seen him. Which was very. “Everyone chooses,” he said. “A person can face up to a difficult truth, or run away from it.”
She shook her head. “My husband is not a coward. I’ve seen him stick his whole arm into the baling machine to untangle the twine while it’s running. Trying to save a hay crop with rain coming in. I mean, if we’re talking guts. He and my in-laws face down hard luck six days a week, and on Sundays they go pray for the truly beleaguered.”
He seemed to take this in, even though he probably didn’t know as many men as she did who’d lost an arm to a baling machine. “These positions get assigned to people,” she said. “If you’ve been called the bad girl all your life, you figure you’re already paying the price, you should go on and use the tickets. If I’m the redneck in the pickup, fine, let me just go burn up some gas.”
Ovid seemed perplexed. Maybe he knew more about butterflies than people.
What I love in this conversation is not just their substance, but their communication style. There’s absolutely no rancor between them. I wish I could replicate that openness and mutual curiosity with everybody I talked to about science and politics and faith and identity and how they all interact. Maybe my stepmother and I would still be on speaking terms.
It is one of Kingsolver’s great strengths, as an author, that she can write such a wide range of characters and still have nearly all of them come across to the reader as sympathetic. She invests humanity into all of them, even the ones she does not agree with, and we understand them the better for it.
If only this feat could be managed with the people we meet in real life.
If you want to see more of my Read or Die collection, hit that recommend button! Reading suggestions from you to me are always welcome too; pitch them to me in a response.
