Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver

As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve just read Small Wonder, a collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver published in 2002, some or all of them gathered from the places they’d been published in the previous few years. It is my first encounter with Kingsolver’s own, non-fictional voice – and yet I somehow felt that I would have recognised it anywhere. It’s exactly the sort of voice you’d expect from the author of her novels – and many of the same themes, of ecology, family, power, and love.

Much of her writing is political – with a small-p, or at least a medium-sized one. The great dividing line in the essays is, of course, 9/11. She is clearly writing in a world still reeling, but she courageously looks beyond the shock and grief – and questions what the response says about the American psyche. What the correct way for the average person to respond is – not dictating how someone should respond emotionally, perhaps, but asking what a proportionate and wise collective response might be. She received death threats for her views (and writes a brilliant chapter on how people have claimed the flag and ‘being American’ for a specific viewpoint – which certainly hasn’t changed). How brave of her to write something like this in 2002:

The American moral high ground can’t possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses. It is critical here to distinguish between innocence and naïveté: the innocent do not deserve to be violated, but only the naive refuse to think about the origins of the violence. A nation that seems to believe so powerfully in retaliation cannot flatly refuse to look at the world in terms of cause and effect. The rage and fury of this world have not notably lashed out at Canada (the nation that takes best care of its citizens), or Finland (the most literate), or Brazil or Costa Rica (among the most biodiverse). Neither have they tried to strike down our redwood forests or the fields of waving grain. Striving to cut us most deeply, they felled the towers that seemed to claim we buy and sell the world.

If she is measured and thoughtful in her writings on politics, perhaps aware of the incendiary resposnes, Kingsolver allows herself to be fiercer when it comes to ecology. Readers of Prodigal Summer won’t be surprised. It is still measured, but it feels like anger that has been distilled into eloquence. I didn’t note down any of the quotes, but she is incredulous about people’s wilful ignorance about the limited resources we are taking from the earth.

Nature is a key theme in Small Wonder, whether macro or micro. She writes beautifully about a hummingbird constructing her nest. And I also loved this, on the joy of living immersed in nature (sidenote, also my first introduction to the American spelling of artefact):

I have come to depend on these places where I live and work. I’ve grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes. No steel, pavement, or streetlights, no architecture lovely or otherwise, no works of public art or private enterprise – no hominid agenda. I consider myself lucky beyond words to be able to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow. In the way of so-called worldly things, I can’t seem to muster a desire for cellular phones or cable TV or to drive anything flashier than a dirt-colored sedan older than the combined ages of my children. My tastes are much more extreme: I want wood-thrush poetry. I want mountains.

This is not the most personal collection of essays (though one certainly gets to know her as a person), but I did also love those that dealt with her life. There are some about her writing career, some about her love of books, and some about her family. My favourite two essays in the collection were back-to-back – ‘Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen’ and ‘Letter to My Mother’. They are simultaneously specific and universal. Her emotional restraint in them somehow makes them feel all the deeper – like when someone is trying to hold back tears.

The structure of her essays does become slightly samey, when read all in a row. She starts from a specific anecdote and widens to the general – not an unusual structure for an essay, of course, but I began to wait for the story about her daughter’s homework, or the conversation she heard in a shop, or reporting a weird story she’d read in a newspaper, to widen out into commentary on a much broader political, social, or environmental topic. And perhaps I preferred her on the detail – on the anecdote, the small moment – than on the rallying cry. The latter is necessary, but it is the former where her gift for precision truly shines. And I think that is my taste for any essay, really. The beautiful, revealing, surprising detail.

It’s interesting to read this collection from a distance of almost two decades. While the issues haven’t changed all that much, popular stances have. Kingsolver’s passionate cries on behalf of the environment are almost mainstream now. Her awareness of global need, and the power and responsibility held by the US, became central discussion topics post-9/11 and never really went away – but it is chilling to read about the Taliban then, and see what’s happening now. And with the eyes of a reader in 2021, Kingsolver’s essays that mention political division seem almost naive. There’s an area that has certainly got worse. I wonder if she has written an essay on Trump and his disciples.

In some ways, reading a collection from 20 years ago can feel more dated than from 100 years ago, because it is in living memory. Her comments on the ubiquity of mobile phones, for instance, read like someone in 1920 complaining of the speed of the infrequent 15-mph cars outside their window. But if she was often a voice in the wilderness, and would still be ignored by a significant section of the flag-wielding, climate-change-denying political spectrum, it does feel like many of her concerns have become much more widely held. The immediacy of these essays has been lost, but the distance also gives perspective to which issues still need to be discussed – which have got better, which worse, and which (like the hummingbird’s nest-building) exist as curiously eternal moments in the midst of the shifting topics of the day.