If they are indeed gestures at authenticity, they fail. I know nothing of the naming conventions of Southern Appalachia, where the Turnbows make their home, but I do know that these names come across as a distraction in this text. Other characters in this book have names like Ovid Byron, and there’s a father-and-son set referred to as Bear and Cub, and children have rich-Brooklyn names like Preston and Cordelia.
If you’re stumbling over that name, I’ll say that I join you, and also advise you to steel yourself. Petty things first: Flight Behavior is the story of a woman named Dellarobia Turnbow. Admitting it to the conversation is the key courtesy it demands. But Flight Behavior’s failings, and its small successes, are just as connected to this question of writing fiction that matters as any book of Munro’s or Roth’s. Ideally, I’d like to hit this point of an essay able to tell you that the dismissal of Kingsolver is wrong, wrong, wrong, and that her new book proves it, that it is a new masterpiece of moral fiction for the modern age. On this one point, we are all Meadow Soprano. But surely we all agree that somewhere, somehow, it’s been decided that Kingsolver belongs to the province of Escape, not Importance. We could quarrel over whether or not this is a side effect of her acceptance of the scarlet O. This is not simply a matter of gender Kingsolver is rarely even mentioned alongside Zadie Smith, or Alice Munro, or even her likeliest boon companion among today’s “serious” female novelists, Ann Patchett.
But she is not, typically, viewed as playing on the same field as many of the English-speaking-world’s greatest authors. In addition to being a giant best-seller, Kingsolver is the winner of a National Book Award, the Orange Prize, and the National Humanities Medal, and is a regular on the lists of other prizes and honors. But his choice of Kingsolver is right on. That moment is not a manifesto about literature it’s a comment on a teenager’s pretensions, a mother’s grasping. As always, David Chase’s laser wit cuts in several different directions.
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