Call of The Eco-Feminist

By Paul Gray

ANIMAL DREAMS by Barbara Kingsolver; HarperCollins; 342 pages; $21.95

Though routinely maligned as a decade of swinish greed, the 1980s also produced a kinder, gentler brand of storytelling, one that might be described as "eco-feminist" fiction. The central plot of this evolving subgenre has become reasonably clear. Women, relying on intuition and one another, mobilize to save the planet, or their immediate neighborhoods, from the ravages -- war, pollution, racism, etc. -- wrought by white males. This reformation of human nature usually entails the adoption of older, often Native American, ways. Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985), an immense novel disguised as an anthropological treatise, contains nearly all the quintessential elements, but significant contributions to the new form have also been made by, among others, Louise Erdrich and Alice Walker.

Now comes Barbara Kingsolver, whose second novel, Animal Dreams, is an entertaining distillation of eco-feminist materials. There is the fragile landscape -- the fictional town of Grace, Ariz., whose river and Edenic orchards face extinction by the Black Mountain Mining Co. And there is the doughty heroine -- Codi Noline, who grew up in Grace and returns home after 14 years of wanderings to teach at the high school and look after her father, the town doctor, who seems to be losing his mind.

Codi certainly does not imagine herself a heroine when she arrives in Grace. "I felt emptied-out and singing with echoes, unrecognizable to myself: that particular feeling like your own house on the day you move out." Codi believes that the brave one in the family is her sister Hallie, three years younger, who has gone to Nicaragua to help peasant farmers. "I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it."

But Codi also finds herself busier than she expected. She meets Loyd Peregrina, half Pueblo, half Apache, whom she had dated briefly in high school; she never told him of the pregnancy and miscarriage that followed. Now she and Loyd fall into an affair that threatens to turn serious, not to say somber. He drives her about neighboring reservations and takes her to some ancient Pueblo villages. She begins to see a difference between inhabiting the land and trying to conquer it: "To people who think of themselves as God's houseguest, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today."

Yes, Codi does have her preachy side, not that it seems to bother Loyd. After she lectures him, he agrees to get rid of his birds and give up cockfighting. There is enough fun in this novel, though, to balance its rather hectoring tone. Codi has a deft way of observing her small, remote hometown, caught uneasily between past and future. When Halloween arrives, she notes, "Grace was at an interesting sociological moment: the teenagers inhaled MTV and all wanted to look like convicted felons, but at the same time, nobody here was worried yet about razor blades in apples." And the matriarchs who make up the town sewing circle, called the Stitch and Bitch Club, are both amusing and formidable.

It is these women, with Codi's help, who set out to save the town from the mining company. Kingsolver introduces other complications, particularly the fate of Hallie, who has been captured by the U.S.-supported contras. To say everything is resolved happily would be misleading, but one hint may be allowed. Anyone who thinks a giant mining concern is any match for the Grace Stitch and Bitch Club has a lot to learn about eco-feminist novels.