He tells her to invest in socially responsible mutual funds and stocks, take restaurant leftovers home in Tupperware, and fly less – this to a woman who can’t afford to travel or to eat in restaurants, and who will never play the stock market. I have to get it from my in-laws.”Įvery point in his green lifestyle pledge is just as irrelevant. We have lamb, we produce that on our farm. “Because mac and cheese only gets you so far, is why. “Are you crazy? I’m trying to increase our intake of red meat.”
In one particularly telling scene, a well-meaning environmentalist asks her to sign a pledge to reduce her carbon footprint, starting by reducing her family’s intake of red meat. She’s excited by the attention, intrigued by a brilliant scientist who sets up operations to study the monarchs, and appalled by how ignorant many of the supposedly educated outsiders are about life in her world. This leads to another invasion – her family and community are disrupted by scientists and reporters and tourists and assorted greens who are drawn by the spectacle and mystery. Flight Behavior is a complex picture of the reality of poverty and class divisions in the world’s richest country, of rapidly changing social values even in the reddest of red states, and above all of the impact of climate change on the daily lives of ordinary working people.Ī radical change in Dellarobia’s life is triggered by the arrival of millions of monarch butterflies in the woods above the Turnbow farm, their age-old migration patterns disrupted by drastic environmental change. that comedians mock as backward and urban liberals condemn as mindlessly religious and conservative.Īt one level, Flight Behavior is an insightful story of one woman’s belated coming-of-age, her efforts to cope with and perhaps escape the limits that life has imposed on her.īut Kingsolver gives us much more than that. Married at seventeen, she now has two young children, a well-meaning but dull husband, and a hard life in a part of the U.S. Dellarobia Turnbow, the central character in Barbara Kingsolver’s beautifully written new novel, is an intelligent but poorly educated young woman living in rural Tennessee.
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