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Enough is enough
Epicurean Simplicity by Stephanie Mills. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002, 190 pp., $22.00 hardcover.
Bonelight: Ruin and Grace in the New Southwest by Mary Sojourner. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2002, 184 pp., $21.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Maxine Kumin

TRAVELING TO AND FROM speaking assignments in the Midwest this week, I had ample time to read these two spirited texts extolling simplicity during my stays in--you've guessed it--chain hotels. The living room of my suite in Grand Rapids could have housed a homeless family. The profligate amount of wasted food at the breakfast buffet could have fed one as well. And even though the major hostelries are economizing on body lotions and conditioners, there was still a daily renewed supply of soaps and shampoos and regular and decaffeinated coffee packets to take back for the women's shelter to redistribute.

Although I didn't need convincing, the above is merely to reinforce what Stephanie Mills and Mary Sojourner declare in very different voices: consumerism, corporate greed and the indifference of a comfortable citizenry are moving us inexorably toward the destruction of our natural world.

Stephanie Mills © Peter M. Mann

Mills lives in the upper Midwest, a site she chose more than fifteen years ago, turning her back on a cozy apartment on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco to take up residence with a counterculturalist she had met at the First North American Bioregional Congress. The marriage did not last, but Mills' love affair with her rural retreat only intensified.

In her own words, "as much eco-puritan as epicurean," she tries to lead the balanced life her beloved philosopher Epicurus proposed in the third century. It is unfortunate that his philosophy has taken on the coloration of hedonism; in truth, he favored a prudent life that revelled in the senses but took nothing to excess.

Mills bikes rather than drives on errands because she does not wish to contribute to "our monstrous output of smog and greenhouse gases." Of course she joins a food co-op, eschewing any but organic foodstuffs, and is eloquent on the subject of learning to work in a group despite the confused egalitarianism this activism involves. The vocation she has chosen is that of a writer, and to be a writer "[O]ne has to be something of a hermit...." So she has elected to live childless and alone, unencumbered with dependents.

"Yet the writing, dissenting life is famously insecure," she confesses. It is a hard pull, but Mills is very clear about her options. She has managed to avoid acquiring a personal computer: "Currently, to earn the Luddite epithet one doesn't have to break machines, just forgo them," she says. I confess I was somewhat taken aback here by what seems to me a rather elaborate casuistry: Mills writes in pencil on a letter pad while the artificial sunlight of a seasonal affective disorder lamp shines on her face, and her manuscript is typed and digitized by a woman whose day job is medical transcription.

Despite this piece of Jesuitical reasoning, Mills is perfectly clear about the world around her: the decline of sugar maple trees as acid rain encroaches, the loss of beech trees to beetle infestation, the superabundance of deer as clear-cutting opens more and more acreage to browse: "We have extirpated the animals that preyed on [them], so it falls to humanity to cull and kill." She is often rhapsodic about simple pleasures--the change of the seasons, a fox's bark, moonrise, a night spent in her sleeping bag under a stand of firs. Her style is crisp and accurate, and she can be hortatory without sounding didactic.

The final chapter is especially stirring as Mills bears witness to ever larger derangements in the ecosystem. The degradation of Lake Michigan in her lifetime provides one searing example. Algae bloom, zebra mussel plague and enough pesticides and PCBs to produce deformed offspring in the waterfowl flocks have reduced much of this once pristine great lake to a slimy pond.

But Mills is emphatic about the limited virtues of living a Thoreauvian life. Cleaning up the environment is not enough. Nor will voluntary simplicity save the world so long as the enormous disparities in income around the planet continue to widen. "The simplicity craze will be worse than useless.... if it leaves the corporate rascals and wealthy elite free to pursue a global climax of greed"--words that have an especially dire ring following on the heels of the Enron and Arthur Anderson scandals.

Mary Sojourner

MARY SOJOURNER has been arrested in protests in the Southwest against the owners of uranium mines, has spoken out against the developers of gated estates hungry for more land on which to build golf courses, and Wal-Marts and chain bookstores nibbling at the neighborhood communities in Flagstaff, Arizona. She is a fiery activist, and her passion is contagious. Like Mills, she is a transplant, having fled the city in the northeast where she spent her good Catholic girlhood, I suspect under a different surname. She tells us little about her early life, except to remark that she did not return to the East for her father's funeral. Both of these remarkable women have come, in middle age, to espouse their causes and celebrate their needs.

Sojourner rails against "deserts scraped raw, intact neighborhoods bulldozed"; "what lies between the dwellings of the richest and poorest is not the bright mineral air of our Big Ditch [the Grand Canyon]. It is the emptiness left after insatiable hungers have fed." These hungers have built two-million-dollar mansions that stand empty eleven months a year, have decorated their sculpted driveways with Range Rovers and Lexuses. Like Mills, Sojourner has been part of the day-to-day struggle to create citizen initiatives, endorse corrective legislation and confront the developers and builders whose acquisitive power moves inexorably forward.

Lyrical outcries, but they go all but unheard. Knopf did not publish this book. Farrar Straus did not opt for it. The major New York presses, no longer independent, passed Bonelight by. Only a small press, an eco-press composed of determined people with limited outreach, would agree to print it. Both Sojourner and Mills are prophets calling into empty "corpo-espresso neon and housing developments...."

Bonelight's essays first appeared in such publications as Arizona Republic and the Flagstaff Women's Newsletter during the 1990s. Their range is narrow but well-focused. Sojourner is not afraid to be personal, to express grief for her dead father, a kind of pride for having left her old life behind, fear for her mortality as she comes into menopause--this from a woman who has borne four children--and pure rage at the developer she faces across the table for a session of pseudo-partnership and compromise: "I will not let the developer buy me food. I wonder if the prohibition against eating with the enemy is as old as the DNA shining in my cells...."

At her dying mother's bedside, she is able to exchange blessings with this woman who gave her "jazz and gospel and Bach," a closure they both desired. She describes camping alone at night at the base of an obsidian flow, outrage at the sight of seven ponderosa pines cut down to make way for another gated housing development, a pilgrimage to the Havasupai sacred site at Red Butte and, finally, gambling addiction. These last essays are burnished not only by her actual experience but by vivid descriptions of life in the casinos. Here are busloads from California of "dazed Asians, Mexicans, and South Americans, peppy old guys, hip-hop homies..., all outnumbered by old women wearing tags that bear names nobody's given a little girl in seventy years: Estelle, Mabel, Velma." What is squandered in these chilled grottoes is not just money, but what Sojourner calls "inheritance"--ties to the younger generation, to the scattered and estranged children and grandchildren.

A coda, post-September 11, is titled "Black Work"--a term in alchemy, she explains, for the transformation of crude material into the divine. Now America belongs to the rest of the world, Sojourner tells us, to a world with no guarantees of safety. We are willy-nilly members of a greater family, well beyond our intentions. She remembers the eighty-year-old mother of a British friend who described surviving the London blitz with the help of "little things. A cup of real tea. Waking up in the morning. Fussing about." Fussing about becomes Sojourner's talisman for keeping going. Not a believer, she nevertheless goes into the pine forest at the base of the mountains and there prays in her own fashion, "Talking to a Great Friend, then listening."

These are moving books, so sincerely written and believed in that the reader may wince at their well-meaning prose. Stephanie Mills may not consciously have modeled Epicurean Simplicity on Thoreau's Walden, but the studied lyricism of her approach, her commitment to the four seasons, even such chapter headings as "The Others," "Conviviality" and "Vocation" suggest Henry David's "Solitude," "Visitors" and "Brute Neighbors." I say this not to criticize but to praise. Thoreau, mourning the loss of forest habitat, laments, "My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?"

Mills' language is not as aphoristic as the master's, but it contains moments of evocative brilliance, as when she observes a gray tree frog on a windowsill of her house, and continues to watch it through the month of May. Her description of a trip to town via bicycle brought to my mind Thoreau's dalliance on the lake in his flat-bottomed rowboat; both exhibit keen sensuous appreciation of their surroundings, tinged with regret.

Mary Sojourner's Bonelight suffers a little from its episodic construction and the purposeful brevity of many of its entries, some running only half a page. But it earns high marks for its useful passion, its call to save the Southwest that she loves from further degradation. Her style is spare and understated. As I sojourned in the land of the Marriotts, I took with me her wish for a new clan: "The Clan of Enough-Is-Enough."

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Meetings of minds
Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings by Rela Mazali. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001, 382 pp., $60.00 hardcover, $24.95 paper.

Reviewed by R. Ruth Linden

MAPS OF WOMEN'S GOINGS AND STAYINGS crosses genres and geography, defying classification as either fiction or nonfiction. Its source material is Rela Mazali's interviews with fifteen women--some real, some fictional--about their experiences traveling throughout the world. Its twelve chapters follow a nonlinear course: each chapter is a "visit" to a non-geographical site, called the "talking house," where readers, author and interview subjects gather. The interviews are punctuated by Mazali's reflections on a wide range of topics that surface during her conversations with her subjects.

Rela Mazali is herself a border crosser. A Jew, she holds dual citizenship in Israel and the United States and is fluent in both cultures but, she would surely add, fully at home in neither one. Her work has been widely published in Hebrew and English and she is also an accomplished translator. A feminist peace and human rights activist, she was one of the creators of the acclaimed 1993 documentary film Testimonies, about the experiences of Israeli soldiers in suppressing the first intifada, and she is a founder of the New Profile movement to demilitarize Israeli civil society. Mazali's politics are intertwined with her writing life. Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings is her first English-language book.

In Maps stories about travel--about women's goings and stayings--become ways to probe the process of translating between languages and historical epochs; the forces that drive and contain women's mobility, chosen and forced, local and transnational; and the conflicts and confrontations played out on women's bodies as they move between their homes in the "West" to lands formerly colonized by the empires of Europe and Asia. These processes become concrete and visceral through Mazali's open-ended conversations with her subjects.

A map from Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings.

To orient her readers, Mazali includes a series of hand-drawn maps that correspond to each of the first ten "visits." Both literal and figurative, these brush and ink drawings identify which interview subjects are present at a given visit. Each woman is represented as an abstractly shaped land mass or "discursive island." Conversational themes or "landmarks" are noted on each island, just as a conventional world map distinguishes rivers, mountains and national capitals. In the map of the fourth visit, for instance, Chava, a key figure in Maps, is represented as the larger of two islands. Elements of her tale--translating and authenticating an ancient manuscript--are noted: her university; the manuscript's author, Caterina; the city of Tabriz, where Caterina grew up; and the palace where she learned to ride a horse. Like a river bisecting the island, a serpentine line that runs north to south represents the manuscript. June, who also appears briefly at the visit, is identified as the smaller island. Her landmarks include California, her first home, and a mountain to which she made a quest during a pivotal life transition.

Mazali's narrative skill is reflected in the artful use of segues. On the second visit, we learn that June and Bashan--both American exiles--each had a child taken away by the state, albeit under quite different circumstances. June lost custody of her three-year-old son in Switzerland where, in the early 1960s, unmarried mothers had no parental authority. Bashan's daughter, Avigail, was the Black Hebrew community's first child born "out of captivity." In the 1960s the community left the United States for the holy land. An American citizen almost eighteen years old, Avigail was arrested in Tel Aviv and deported to the States for traveling beyond the desert town of Dimona, where the Black Hebrews were confined, much like Palestinians are confined today in the cantons of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Like the serpentine river/manuscript running through Chava's tale, human rights work is a recurrent theme in Maps. Judith, an American psychologist and anthropologist, traveled to El Quiche, in the mountains of Guatemala, to document the effects of the military's campaign of terror and genocide on women and children. Maria practiced physical therapy in the West Bank and Gaza, caring for Palestinian victims of the Israeli military. (Mazali herself regularly crossed the "Erez" military checkpoint into Gaza to document human rights violations.)

The juxtaposition of like elements from conversations with different women provides thematic coherence and nonintrusive structure in a work that might otherwise spill off the pages. It also creates the impression that some interview subjects have met, which Mazali explains has not actually happened. Most of Mazali's interview subjects are flesh-and-blood women, but others are the creation of her own mind, though she does not inform readers about the ontological status of any particular woman. Maps invites us to "bracket" this knowledge and engage in a reader's game of make-believe.

CHAVA'S TALE is the centerpiece of Maps, a story within a story. A long-time graduate student and university lecturer living in Tel Aviv, her world is turned upside-down when a friend disappears, leaving a seven-hundred-year-old manuscript in her custody--the journal of Caterina de Viglionis, who lived during the time of Marco Polo. According to historian Leonardo Olschki, Caterina was the only European woman recorded inside the borders of thirteenth-century China. She was the granddaughter of Pietro Viglioni, a Venetian mercantile colonist, and her journal is an account of becoming a nomadic healer and herbalist. In Europe, a century later, women like Caterina began to be burned as witches.

Chava becomes engrossed in translating and authenticating Caterina's journal, written in a medieval Venetian dialect. International specialists in optics, physics, chemistry and antiquarian documents examine the manuscript and conclude that it is exactly what it appears to be-that it is real. "I know it seems pretty unreal," Chava concedes.

"I know you're probably asking yourself if it's all a uh big fairy tale or maybe if I'm a little you know a little nuts. So am I.... The book's real. That's as definite as it can get with contemporary methods [of authentication]. I mean sure it's real, it's a thing that you can hold except that now it's locked away in the library.... And in some ways it's really the kind of writing that was done then except nev--as far as we've known till now never by women." (p. 81)

The authenticity of such a work, produced when literacy and the technologies of writing were virtually the exclusive purview of an elite class of men, may strike readers as far-fetched. Indeed, the question is never finally resolved, leaving readers to decide for themselves. But by the time my rational mind could build a case against Caterina's journal, my believing mind had got caught up in the intrigue and wanted the mystery to unfold, unencumbered by doubts.

Translating the text proves to be at least as tricky as determining its authenticity. As Chava wrestles with how to represent a single passage that might have conflicting meanings, she finds herself caught up in the indeterminate, polysemic character of language itself.

One version of... [the] translation says "realize letters." A second says "recite letters." Chava has said she's undecided. It could be either. The words in mercantile Venetian share the same root. The script is hard to read.... She tentatively opted for "recite letters" because the next sentence is: "And my father came to listen." But she hated omitting "realized letters"... [because] she thinks Caterina is describing a process in which the use of writing and calculation dawned on her, where she happened to be exposed to them and came to understand what they were used for, why she might need them. (p. 110)

The translation process becomes an allegory of the inseparability of the knower from the known and theories from "facts," which can never speak for themselves, and the local, situated and partial nature of truths.

Like Chava, Mazali reflexively explores her own practices of knowledge-making, including a stretch in Chapter Nine where she plays with the border-marking conventions of capitalization and punctuation. Undermining these conventions pushes readers to notice them, ask whether they matter to the story and, if they do, then why and how. Does the capital "I" privilege the author's self, thereby diminishing readers' active participation as meaning-makers? How do decisions about where to begin and end sentences and insert pauses and clauses affect readers' interpretations and understanding of a work, and, hence, their knowledge of the world?

... i've warned you there's no way i can innocently represent the different women who make up this house. i've said i can only represent small fragments, elicited from the fluid process of change that is each. so that all the present, presented, personalities and speech and stories are refracted through my mind, reconstructed. sometimes imagined, madeup. making them amplifiers of my own voice while i presume to transmit theirs. (pp. 265-266)

Maps is a study of the production of knowledge with a daring narrative vision. An intricate weave of spellbinding stories, it is an aural work: through the sound of the embodied voices of the author and her interview subjects the text comes to life and realizes its full power. By exploring novel reading practices that engage the spoken and performative possibilities inherent in this work, readers will discover Maps' sensuousness and subtle brilliance.

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Inside the talking house
In a recent phone conversation, Ruth Linden asked Rela Mazali to talk about some of the key elements of Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings.

RRL: I wonder if you could talk about how the notion of the talking house emerged, and the function that you intended it to serve in the book.

RM: When I began writing the book--I hadn't interviewed all of the women, but I had already interviewed a good number of them--I knew that I didn't want to write a chapter about each different woman and her life story, because what interested me was the way that each of them reflected back off the other. In a way that fact was what created the talking house. I brought these women together when they were never really together, under an imaginary roof that had to be pliant and flexible and mobile enough to admit different women at different times and different places as a sort of a community. It became this fantasized meeting place. Sometimes it felt as if I wanted to take it beyond the fantasy and make it into something much more concrete and real, and there are points in the book where that happens, but for the most part it's very clear about being a fantasy, about being imagined. Even though it's imagined, it's something that has presence, and power, and can form the reality of the book, or the reality, maybe, of the readers of the book, in different ways.

RRL: So among the many boundaries Maps crosses is the boundary between reality and fantasy.

RM: Yes--the talking house there and not there at the same time, and you're free to choose whether to be within it or without it.

I wanted to connect this with women's standard relation or commitment to a cultural construct of home. Home is a place that very often renders women relatively immobile. That's where they're supposed to invest, that's where they're supposed to feel safe, to find their future and live happily ever after. In that sense home is a restricting idea or concept; it's not always felt as restriction but actually in many cases plays itself out as a restrictive force. The talking house, in a way, was an antithesis to that: it's a home that is not restrictive and that you don't have all that much commitment to--you can come and go and you feel fine with it, and it accepts you, with your comings and goings.

RRL: One of the threads running through Maps that really intrigued me was Catarina's journal and Chava's relationship to that journal which finds its way into her hands. I couldn't help but wonder whether that relationship is informed by experiences in your own life--I know that you are a prominent translator, and the character of Chava as a translator in your work seemed not coincidental.

RM: I agree, it's not coincidental: Chava's story concentrates and epitomizes the issues that I'm digging through and trying to understand in Maps--the relationship between truth and knowing and evidence and authority, what we take to be knowledge, how we decide that, what we discard along the way, and how our own personal situations, even our physical situatedness, affects that. And to what extent we ever really know anything. The relationship between Chava and Catarina illustrates some of the boundaries that are maybe uncrossable, though I don't think we ever stop trying to cross them, trying to understand, trying to get a sense of another person, another culture, another country, trying to get at the truth, even if we believe very deeply that there is no way of getting to The Truth with a capital T. I think we're still committed to try.

RRL: You tell your readers several times in the book that some of the characters are made up, and I'm tempted to ask you if Chava and Catarina's journal are imaginary... but I won't ask. That kind of riddle is part of the pleasure of reading Maps. It's fun and difficult, because it requires the reader to suspend many assumptions that we all bring to texts because we have to. We can question and challenge our assumptions but, nonetheless, they're there.

RM: I agree, there has to be a place to start, otherwise we're into eternally receding reality. You walk that line between fact and fiction as you read, I hope, and it becomes an issue, so you have to either ignore it or ask yourself why it matters to you. You have to deliberate about it and then maybe try to push it away: Is it true, isn't it true? Do I mind if it is? Why? All of that is a major part of what I'm working with. The sense of actually doing that as you're reading is a major theme of the book, and I'm glad that that's how you read it.

RRL: There was a point in my reading, I think it was about three-quarters of the way through the book, when my experience of dislocation and of lostness fell away. At that point, when I began to feel that I was reading on steady ground, that the textual ground was firm, I came to understand that perhaps the story of Chava and Catarina's journal was a kind of allegory, or a story within a story; there was a moral tale here to be told about being in the world and knowing in the world. That was a moment of immense pleasure and joy for me because I felt that I had in some way grasped some thread of your project, that I had gotten the riddle.

RM: It's wonderful to listen to your account of the process of reading, because it's very much what I was trying to accomplish, and I know that it isn't necessarily what people will see in the book. Just as I think our situatedness affects the way we perceive the world, and truth, and reality, it affects the way readers perceive texts. Every reader is a different world. So if some of the readers have experienced this disorientation and gotten through it to a sense of being grounded and clear, and of understanding that this very concentrated narrative stands for a good deal of what the book is about, then to me that's wonderful.

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Barbara Kingsolver © Seth Kantner.

Reviewed by Harriet Malinowitz

THE SEEMINGLY EVER-RIGHTWARD swing of politics in the United States is attributable to many factors, among which rhetoric plays no small part. Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation (which helped generate the Reaganomics policies of the 1980s) supply legislators and media with beguiling rationales for right-wing programs that shape public opinion and win votes; the Left, overburdened with intellectuals who lampoon facile logic, venerate critical analysis and seem to have the time to dig up and cross-reference arcane information on the Internet, usually ends up talking to itself. If only the penetrating content of The Nation could be marketed in the plainspoken form of Reader's Digest!

Enter Barbara Kingsolver. With sales figures for her popular novels--The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, The Poisonwood Bible--liberating her from the relative obscurity of the alternative media ghetto, she's a lefty who, like rock star Bono reporting on poverty in Africa, can get hostile or indifferent people to listen. Noam Chomsky she's not, but with her censor-defying sincerity, adamant sense of right and wrong and casserole-baking dedication to the well-being of others, she has the ability--and the palatability--to channel the essence of complex, non-commercially-funded political discourse from the likes of ZNet and Pacifica Radio to the masses who get their information from the likes of CNN and Fox Broadcasting.

Fox is owned, in fact, by Rupert Murdoch's global News Corporation--which also happens to own Kingsolver's publisher, HarperCollins. And HarperCollins also happens to be the publisher of filmmaker Michael Moore's recent bestseller Stupid White Men, whose first 50,000 copies were unluckily printed on September 10, 2001 and then almost pulped because the book's irreverent tone (chapter titles included "A Very American Coup," about Election 2000) was deemed "inappropriate" and "unpatriotic" a day later. (It was saved by an uprising of anti-censorship librarians.) I have heard of no comparable brakes being put on Kingsolver's book. On the contrary, despite her critique--quite brave when first written--of the "War on Terrorism" and the associated need for American soul-searching, as well as her frank appraisal of many other shortcomings of our nation's politics and culture, HarperCollins has issued a "Reading Group Guide" with gentle questions: "How have (sic) reading these essays made you feel? Sad? Angry? Hopeful? How have they encouraged you to act on these emotions? How have they changed the way you look at your world?" They could just as well have been writing about an Oprah pick.

Kingsolver, who lives in Tucson with her husband and two daughters, set to work on this book on September 12, 2001. Responding to a request from a newspaper to write about the terrorist attacks, she found that the task proved therapeutic, and other essays on the same theme soon poured forth. Ultimately, she compiled "a collection of parables and reveries" (many of which had been published previously) on an assortment of subjects with a common thread: the ability of "small wonders" found in nature and human kindness to replenish hope worn thin by hatred and violence. Writing, she found, was "the one alternative to weeping without cease," and reaching out to others through this medium felt like her "own way of giving blood in a crisis."

Now, that's an interesting metaphor. The deluge of blood donation around September 11 was a heartfelt mass gesture which missed the mark of actual need: few survivors of that immediate crisis required transfusions, yet chemotherapy and surgery patients face a perpetually low supply--a predicament that reappeared once the short shelf life of crucial components collected last fall was over. Yet, while Kingsolver's "giving blood in a crisis" image is more emotional than apt, it also vastly understates the breadth of her subject matter and abiding social commitment. The reader is left without a doubt that Kingsolver--who is a trained biologist, as well as the spouse and occasional co-author of an ornithologist--cares deeply about a wide range of burning issues. Among these are the preservation of biodiversity, the sustenance of ecosystems, poverty and the distribution of wealth, American overconsumption, the perils of genetic engineering, "responsible eating" (organic, in-season and locally grown, though not necessarily vegetarian), responding humanely to violence, learning from the Columbine school shootings and the contradictions of US foreign policy. Regarding this last, she writes:

Our whole campaign against the Taliban, Afghan women's oppression, and Osama bin Laden was undertaken without nearly enough public mention of our government's previous involvement with this wretched triumvirate, in service of a profitable would-be pipeline from the gas fields of Turkmenistan. If the CIA and some U.S. corporate heads are romancing the same ilk elsewhere, right now, for similar reasons, then this high-minded talk of "Enduring Freedom" is wearing thin on my patience. (p. 254)

WHEN KINGSOLVER IS NOT IN PAIN about the world's ills, she often sounds like she's overdosing on Prozac. This tendency is most pronounced when she writes about the ecstasies afforded by nature: the "remarkable" and "marvelous" Grand Canyon, a bobcat at her window, the trickly but inspiringly steadfast San Pedro River, the endangered scarlet macaw of Costa Rica, a hermit crab, the "spectacular perfection" of a hummingbird building its nest, flowers blooming in the desert ("Who planted them?" asks a friend; "God planted them!"), and a gathering of chachalacas, birds in the Mexican forest who, en masse, sound like a "chorale," an "oratory," a "revelation" and a "gospel song" which climaxes--to Kingsolver's ears--with "Glory hallelujah!"

For more demanding readers, Kingsolver might be more engaging if she were to complicate some of her firmly-held views. Like a sign at a demonstration that says "Give peace a chance," the stands she takes are sometimes blandly laudable and consequently a bit toothless. "The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In"--her diatribe against television, fortified by her allegation that print media is superior--sets up a false dichotomy in which communication via images is intrinsically entertainment-driven and manipulative, while communication via words provides a "deeper assessment" of issues. Television is concerned with Monica Lewinsky; newspapers are concerned with global warming. Has she read USA Today?

More troubling still is her essay, "And Our Flag Was Still There." Like Katha Pollitt's "Put Out No Flags," published in The Nation on October 8, 2001, the piece concerns a daughter who comes home from school one day soon after September 11 wanting to brandish the Red, White and Blue. In each case, the progressive mother initially resists, but different philosophical trajectories ensue. Pollitt concludes that the meaning of the flag is indeterminate: it represents "jingoism and vengeance and war" and "standing together and honoring the dead." But we're still stuck with the reality that "there are no symbolic representations right now for the things the world really needs--equality and justice and humanity and solidarity and intelligence." Realizing that "the connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a world away back to the proverbial stone age" eludes her daughter--though it is vivid in her own Vietnam-imprinted mind--she strikes a strategic compromise: "I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers, but the living room is off-limits."

Kingsolver, in contrast, comes to favor the romantic notion that a public symbol may simply be harnessed to "mean," in some stable way, whatever we want it to. "[A]ny symbol conceived in liberty deserves the benefit of the doubt," she reflects, and finally accedes to her daughter's wishes "because my wise husband put a hand on my arm and said, 'You can't let hateful people steal the flag from us.'" (Never mind that the assertions--that the flag was "conceived in liberty" and was "stolen" from good people like "us"--utterly beg the question.) Her righteous indignation at the intolerant "bully-patriots claiming to own my flag" after September 11 reads like another version of the now-familiar thesis that "we" are right and good, while "those evildoers" are wrong: "[T]hese hoodlum-Americans were asking me to believe that their flag stood for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder? Well, our flag does not, and I'm determined that it never will."

The flag, she later amplified on a public radio show while promoting the book, "stands for courage, justice, and kindness." The problem is, their flag and our flag happen to look exactly alike, and the casual onlooker usually can't tell which intended message is fluttering from any particular mast. And Kingsolver, insisting that, as a "good American," she will "defend the American ideals of freedom and human kindness," imagines she can, with a stroke of the pen, nullify the "Americanness" of the ideals and people that horrify her. But that's called denial. White supremacy, xenophobia and other forms of bigotry are, along with some nobler principles, an inescapable part of our collective national history.

It's this sort of naiveté--some would call it "American optimism"--that will cause some readers to wince, while it will win the hearts and minds of others. Pollitt's insistence that we need altogether new symbols--because the old are tainted with defective values--would surely inflame the nationalist identity of mainstream America (if they ever heard her). Kingsolver's claim to ownership of patriotic ideology and hoary symbols, as well as her faith that the soul of America can be restored to some former state of grace, makes her broadly intelligible and provisionally acceptable. (And they will hear her.)

Warmhearted, resilient and undistracted by fame and fortune from the things she knows really matter, Barbara Kingsolver writes in a voice that is not only for the people, but of the people. When she asks with unfeigned bewilderment, "How does the rest of the world keep a straight face when we go riding into it on our latest white horse of Operation-this-or-that-kind-of-Justice, and everyone can see perfectly well how we behave at home?" it's easy to imagine a flash of recognition in the heads of good but conventionally-minded people who are rarely exposed to dissident ideas. Kingsolver would be gratified by this, and so should we all be. She had both the courage and the connections to get her own dissident ideas printed on op-ed pages across the nation at a time when they were hugely unpopular. Perhaps wrapping radical notions in homespun packages is just the innovation the world needs.

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