Poisonwood, Again

My sophomores are reading The Poisonwood Bible, and I am once again, for perhaps the twelfth or thirteenth time, reading back through a book that continues to impress me and to satisfy my readerly appetites for style and substance. It's a book with a large narrative sweep, covering thirty years in the history of a family of American missionaries who travel to the Belgian Congo and live there during the brief flowing of its short-lived constitutional democracy. It explores themes of identity and responsibility and complicity at the microcosmic level, narrating events in the lives of the family members as they work through their experiences in the fictional village of Kilanga, and at the macrocosmic level, narrating the all-too-real, historically accurate events involving the CIA's participation in the removal from office and subsequent murder of Patrice Lumumba, and the installation of Joseph Mobutu as absolute dictator.

Concerned as it is with the disparity between the publicly stated goals of American foreign policy and the actual courses of action pursued by the American government in practice, it offers abundant food for thought, whether one looks backward in time (for example, to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy by American business and military agents in 1893), at the present moment (read, for example, Ken Silverstein's sobering but excellent Parties of God in this month's Harper's), or into the somewhat hazy crystal ball at the future, during which we will reap the benefits of whatever wisdom is guiding our current foreign policies, and/or pay the consequences of its shortsightedness and stupidity.

So it's a thought-provoking book at the thematic level. But it's also a remarkably well-crafted book at the sentence and paragraph level as well, and offers subtle pleasures for those inclined to attend to them. Take, for example, this passage:

In the front room our dining table looks to have come off a wrecked ship, and there is an immense rolltop desk (possibibly from the same ship) used by Our Father for writing his sermons. The desk has wooden legs and cast-iron chicken's feet, each clutching a huge glass marble, through three of the marbles are cracked and one is gone, replaced by a chink of coconut husk in the interest of a level writing surface. In our parents room, more furniture: a wooden bureau and an old phonograph cabinet with no workings inside. All brought by other brave Baptists before us, thought it is hard to see quite how... We also have a dining room table and a rough handmade cupboard, containing a jumble-sale assortment of glass and plastic dishes and cups, one too few of everything, so we sisters have to bargain knives for forks while we eat. The cabinet also contains an ancient cracked plate commemorating the World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and a plastic cup bearing the nose and ears of a mouse. And in the midst of this rubble, serene as the Virgin Mother in her barnful of shepherds and scabby livestock, one amazing, beautiful thing: a large, oval white platter painted with delicate blue forget-me-nots, bone china, so fine that sunlight passes through it. It's origin is unfathomable. If we forgot ourselves we might worship it. (61)

Here, Adah, one of the Price family daughters, describes the physical setting of the house in which they are living. The passage is essentially a list: a table, a desk, a bureau, some household objects. And yet the precision with which the objects are observed is impressive. The genius is in the details: the "chicken's feet, each clutching a huge glass marble, through three of the marbles are cracked and one is gone, replaced by a chink of coconut husk," the "plastic cup bearing the nose and ears of a mouse." There's also the gradual heightening of the emotional temperature of the piece toward the end with the description of china platter, achieved by the arresting simile ("serene as the Virgin Mother in her barnful of shepherds and scabby livestock, one amazing, beautiful thing: a large, oval white platter"), the religiosity of which sets up the even more overtly religious tonality of the closing remark ("If we forgot ourselves we might worship it.") This, coming from a preacher's daughter, suggests both the seductiveness of the beauty of the plate and the implied dangers of that heresy. All of which is by way of setting up a moment, later on in the story, when that plate, and all that it symbolizes, comes into sharper focus.

This is writing which gets a lot of work done in a relatively small amount of words. Kingsolver's selection of details is telling and carefully cadenced, and often poetic (sound out that passage about the chicken's feet one more time, or look again at sequencing of the words in the Virgin Mother simile. This is writing that rewards sustained attention. I've been teaching this book since it came out in 1998, and I still think it's terrific.