Flight club

LIGHT BEHAVIOR By Barbara Kingsolver  Harper Collins, 433 pages Available at National Book Store

One of my favorite surprises in the Philippines was a firefly cruise on the Loay River in Bohol: unexpected, to hop on an unlit raft at night and merge with the mangroves, then watch the sky light up in a swarm of a thousand twinkling pinpoint lights.

Nature is full of surprises — some good, some bad — and that’s at the heart of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Flight Behavior. Ostensibly about a wandering wife, plotting infidelity yet reeling from guilt, it takes a surprising turn when she discovers what looks like a sea of fire on her family’s backyard mountain property: it turns out to be a sea of monarch butterflies, hundreds of thousands of them basking in the unspoiled woods, hanging off the branches like luminescent bunches of grapes.

Dellarobia (the wayward wife) doesn’t know what to make of it; she was expecting a tryst with her almost-lover in a woodsy cabin; instead, she faces a complicated vision that first makes her feel judged, then cleansed, then a whole lot of other things as the novel progresses.

Environmental concern is the theme of Flight Behavior, but it’s not approached clunkily, the way, say, Jonathan Franzen worked in his eco themes in the novel Freedom (also about infidelity). At first, Dellarobia (who could seriously use a nickname) comes off as annoyingly selfish: she heads off to the woods as the novel begins, her kids in someone else’s care, fully aware that she is on a course to “wreck her family.” Yet she stills does it. Dell doesn’t not love her husband, Cub; she just married young (at 17), pregnant, and not really knowing the guy who, 10 years later, she feels she has little in common with. It’s a familiar scenario in women’s literature: the moment when a woman decides to take her life and her own happiness by the reins, despite the consequences this may entail. It may remind you of the opening of Eat Pray Love, another book where I found myself asking: Why should I feel sympathy for a character who knows she’s tossing her life aside, on the odd chance of more happiness? Of course, this is the main concern of most women’s literature these days. Dissatisfaction, with periods of self-policing and self-punishment as the female characters make their mistakes, followed by true knowledge and self-awareness. (Note: This is the Chick Lit Template. The Guy Lit Template is a bit different: the male characters mess up their lives spectacularly — boozing, carousing, fighting, lying, cheating — and never feel guilty about it, never suffer internal punishment, until they almost head straight down the drain and only then realize how much they’ve screwed up their lives. Literary bonus points if it’s too late.)

In chick lit such as this, where males are apt to say aloud, “Well, why are you doing it, then, if you know it’s wrong?”, it helps that the authors are skilled enough — as Elizabeth Gilbert and Kingsolver are — to make you see the complexity of their characters and sympathize.

Dellarobia earns our sympathy. She’s only 27, but feels like her life is used up already, tending a farmer husband and two kids. She’s also addicted to nicotine, which is mostly symbolic. Seeing the monarch butterflies on a mountain is some kind of miracle, or at least a sign of something bigger than her problems on the horizon.

I liked the environmental angle of Flight Behavior, precisely because it is bigger than Dellarobia’s problems. She is visited by a Mexican family who describe how clear-cut logging has destroyed their lives in Michoacán; a denuded mountain slid down into their village, burying children and families — a scenario that’s painfully familiar and real to Filipinos who recall landslides killing dozens in Pantukan and Negros Oriental last year; or worse, the Southern Leyte landslide that buried 1,000 villagers in 2006. All can be traced to typhoon rains combined with denuded mountainsides.

Pulsing through Flight Behavior is an environmental warning bell: when monarch butterflies head blindly north, seeking new cooler climes to reproduce, it means the world is out of whack, climate-wise. They’re the canaries in the coalmine. Yet much of Kingsolver’s novel pivots uncertainly between this and Dellarobia’s drifting story: her need to feel free and alive, which — let’s face it — doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the real, globally warming world.

Dellarobia is taken into the employ of Dr. Ovid Byron, a scientist bent on studying why the monarchs came north, before they all perish in a winter frost. Still, she entertains fantasies of running away with Byron, who at least sees she’s capable of more than picking up the kids from school. In fact, she worries that the monarchs will just go away, leaving her stuck with her boring, uneventful life: “She could easily end up back where all this started, launching her heart on some risky solo flight after a man.” (Hence the book’s title.) 

The debate over climate grows to a boil when a local TV anchor, Tina Ultner, interviews Dr. Byron and claims scientists “disagree” that global warming even exists. Dr. Byron begs to differ:

“What scientists disagree on now, Tina, is how to express our shock. The glaciers that keep Asia’s watersheds in business are going right away. Maybe one of your interns could Google that for you. The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the coalmine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?”

Kingsolver has buried a timely warning about earth’s future in a woman’s story about whether to stay or go, but her narrative skill pulls you along, with the conviction that the world may not change its views that much, but one woman’s view of the world can change considerably.