Flying Patterns

Abstract

Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 464 pages, $16.99, paperback. Life is no crystal staircase for Dellarobia, the main character in Barbara Kingsolver's novel Flight Behavior. It is a stirring read, but not as much as her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible, a powerful female-centric story set in the Belgian Congo.… In Flight Behavior, Dellarobia is rearing two small kids in a low-income household, and living in the "right-to-work" (at low pay) state of Tennessee. She is alienated from herself, her husband, and especially her mother-in-law. In an era of U.S. working-class demobilization, Dellarobia is adrift in a loveless marriage. She and her husband Cub married young and became parents before fully getting to know each other.… Dellarobia's angst develops within monopoly-finance capitalism. Kingsolver, like Emily Dickinson before her, shows and tells the story slant.

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