Barbara Kingsolver: Urban vs Rural

One of my least admirable qualities, according to my wife, is that I quit books. She will read a book that she detests all the way until the last page just because she started it. She doesn’t quit books. I, on the other hand, am convinced that there are millions of great books out there that I haven’t read and I’m not about to waste my finite time on a book that isn’t great — whether I’m two pages into it or two hundred, I’m fine with cutting my losses at any point.

When some years back I quit in the middle of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible, it was the worst literary failure that my wife had ever seen of me. She still brings it up. She loved the story of the missionary family in the Congo, and she had been the one to hopefully recommend the book to me, and then I only got halfway through it.

But all’s not lost with me and Kingsolver. Though I won’t be returning to what the novelist has to say about missionaries in Africa, I find her thoughts on biology and rural living perspicacious. In an essay she wrote called “The Good Farmer,” she says this:

“In my professional life I’ve learned that as long as I write novels and nonfiction books about strictly human conventions and constructions, I’m taken seriously. But when my writing strays into that muddy territory where humans are forced to own up to our dependence on the land, I’m apt to be declared quaintly irrelevant by the small, acutely urban clique that decides in this country what will be called worthy literature. (That clique does not, fortunately, hold much sway over what people actually read.) I understand their purview, I think. I realize I’m beholden to people working in urban centers for many things I love: They publish books, invent theater, produce films and music. But if I had not been raised such a polite Southern girl, I’d offer these critics a blunt proposition: I’ll go a week without attending a movie or concert, you go a week without eating food, and at the end of it we’ll sit down together and renegotiate ‘quaintly irrelevant.’”

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