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OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB®
The wait is over!
Oprah® has made her book-club selection for June: Barbara Kingsolver's "The
Poisonwood Bible," available now for 50% off at Amazon.com.
As any reader of "The Mosquito Coast" knows, men who drag their families
to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any good, while those familiar with "At Play in the
Fields of the Lord" or "Kalimantaan" understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on the fictional
stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price along with his
wife and four daughters off to Africa in "The Poisonwood Bible," you can be sure that salvation is the
one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher,
has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully
unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes
into the jungle," says Leah, one of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that
the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the
middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous
snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity,
there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse?
In fact they can and they do. The first part of "The Poisonwood Bible" revolves around Nathan's intransigent,
bullying personality and his effect on both his family and the village they have come to. As political instability
grows in the Congo, so does the local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge with tragic
consequences about halfway through the novel. From that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows
each member's fortune across a span of more than 30 years.
"The Poisonwood Bible" is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's most ambitious work, and it reveals both her
great strengths and her weaknesses. As Nathan Price's wife and daughters tell their stories in alternating chapters,
Kingsolver does a good job of differentiating the voices. But at times they can grate--teenage Rachel's tendency
towards precious malapropisms is particularly annoying (students practice their "French congregations";
Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a "tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's
tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which
she uses her characters as mouthpieces to explicate the complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo.
Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realized, three-dimensional characters make "The Poisonwood
Bible" compelling, especially in the first half, when Nathan Price is still at the center of the action. And
in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is at her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement,
and lyrical prose that have made her previous novels so successful. --Alix Wilber