Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible is an exercise in endurance. Kingsolver is a beautiful writer, her voice is a perfect vehicle for this patchwork narrative and you’ll find her prose by turns ponderous, on other curves playful, a cadenced eye cast on what can only be described as life lured or provoked into that tenuous balance between being and living where the differences are uncertain.
Kingsolver is a native of Kentucky, yet good writing knows no geography, and while Kingsolver might find comparisons to Oxford’s oracle flattering, she might well find it annoying. Faulkner, more than any other American writer in the past century, has been used by countless critics and academics as a rough rule of thumb for superiority among writers whose sentences involve any degree of rhetorical convolutions, and though this is a measure of the length of his shadow, the comparison has become far too trite to be taken seriously in any context.
What confounds this parity with The Poisonwood Bible, the tragedy of Orleanna Price, is that she is from Pearl, Mississippi. Why Kingsolver chose Pearl of all places as the hometown for this woman, the wife of a religious fanatic who sacrifices his family out of zealotry, is a question only she can answer, but one worth asking.
