“It’s been so long.” she said. “You talk just like me.”
I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy. I pretty much read exclusively fantasy and other genre fiction nowadays. Both my personal work and my academic research interests concern fantasy, so I rarely branch out anymore. But a sweet wonderful friend who is too pure for this world and I would jump in front of a moving bus for her at any moment, told me to read this book. So I did it. Also not to remove credit from her recommendation, but I’ve been reading a lot of rubbish lately so I needed a change.
And this is going to make me sound like a bad fantasy lover, a faker, a poser!! But it’s just how it's shaken out—I finally loved a book. I feel like it's been ages. The book in question is The Bean Trees, the debut novel by Barbara Kingsolver. And it was fantastic.
The blurb on the front calls it “the Southern novel taken West.” Our main character, Taylor, flees her tiny hometown in Kentucky to go West to find herself. She’s leaving dead end jobs, teen pregnancy, and a lot of nowhere and nothing. And she leaves behind her Mama. Somewhere in Oklahoma, she is literally given a toddler by a stranger, and she takes her in. It’s almost frustrating how little thought she gives to keeping this child and a lot of negative reviews of this book focus on that a lot. Just roll with it, it’s half of what makes Taylor so charming. She settles in Arizona, makes friends, gets a job, the usual. Taylor’s story forefronts a lot of larger commentary about immigration, classism, and child abuse. I love a southern novel. I’m from Flannery O’Connor’s hometown, and we mean business about her. I come from a matriarchal deep southern family. So maybe I’m the target audience. Maybe I see myself in these women.
I see its faults. A book about a white woman making a lot of half-hearted commentary on POC issues. One of Taylor’s big moments is her saying: “Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they're down–look what they do to those people at Mattie’s. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country” (170). But for Taylor, a sheltered character, who practically never even met an immigrant, this might as well be a manifesto. For half the book she is struggling to understand how a person can even be “illegal.” I almost think the point of forefronting Taylor is to draw attention to the unintentional complicity of white America being faced with these issues head-on instead of allowing them to fade into the background, which our society does by default. Taylor means well. The final act of the book sees her committing several federal crimes by transporting her two friends to a safehouse across state lines. Her conviction and fierce protection of her friends, her chosen family, is what makes her so compelling.
If I can return quickly to her not really questioning keeping the toddler, who she names Turtle. If you zoom out, yeah, okay, it’s weird that she didn’t call the police—especially when she discovers that Turtle had been sexually abused. It’s a little strange that she just adopts Turtle and that’s the end of it. But I think that is who Taylor is. She is very straightforward, steadfast, and headstrong. Blunt, to a fault. Over the course of the book, you learn this about her, that she really doesn’t see two ways about much of anything. So her keeping Turtle just makes sense. Get over it! However, I do think Taylor is a little too variable. In some scenes, she blends into the background, she asks and answers in ways that fit the other characters a little too well. This is Kingsolver’s first novel, and she needed to say what she wanted to say, and so Taylor’s character suffers a little because of it. This is not an indictment of the book at large.
The writing is magic. I have so many tabs stuck to the pages, of lines I just thought were funny, or well-written, or sad. I want to remember every line. The dialogue, especially between Taylor and Lou-Ann, the roommate in Tucson that just so happens to also be from Kentucky. Their southern quips and ways of speaking are far out of place in Arizona. When Taylor meets Lou-Ann for the first time, answering the call for a roommate in the paper, Lou-Ann is disarmed by hearing home. She puts her hand over her mouth, and Taylor says “what is it?” and Lou-Ann responds, smiling: “It’s been so long, you talk just like me” (76). I had to put the book down, I was crying a little. A camaraderie formed instantly between them, tethered by their accents, their colloquialisms. I have a Southern accent myself, and have often been embarrassed by it, and have made many attempts to soften it for fear of looking dumb. Outside of my family, I don’t often let it out as thick as is natural. I can imagine the relief of not having heard yourself in so long, being so far away. I can imagine the safety Lou-Ann felt.
This novel is a celebration of family, chosen or otherwise. So it’s character driven. Which shines because of the really wonderful writing. It’s quick-witted, smart, and bare-bones. It doesn’t spend a whole lot of time on big scenery descriptions, or fluffy monologues. It’s a small book, about a small group, and it’s content to let the reader live with them for a while.
The most poignant scene comes at the end. Minor spoilers, but I won’t give it all away. Taylor needs to find a way to keep Turtle. She’s come all the way to Oklahoma on a naive mission to find her biological family, to find someone to sign her over. Her friends, Guatemalan refugees, pose as the Cherokee family of Turtle, and the reader watches as Esperanza says a heart wrenching goodbye to Turtle, a catharsis for her never having said goodbye to her own daughter, taken from her.
“A mother and child—in a world that could barely be bothered with mothers and children—who were going to be taken apart. Everybody believed it. Possibly Turtle believed it. I did.” (215)
I could sit here and go through it page by page and type out the parts I have bookmarked, but I’d be here all NIGHT.
4/5