The book’s success stems from Kingsolver’s willingness to stay focused on a conflicted young woman and her faltering marriage, while a strange symptom of the degraded environment overwhelms her remote Tennessee town. In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to promote, among other liberal goals, novels that “advocate the preservation of nature.” Fortunately, her own books have been more subtle than the earnest Bellwether winners, and “Flight Behavior” is not the op-ed-in-story-form that one might fear. Now the sun rises on Barbara Kingsolver’s “ Flight Behavior,” a climate-change novel described by the publisher as “her most accessible and commercial book to date” - the literary equivalent of whole-wheat pasta your kids will love! There are, of course, reasons to be skeptical. Two years ago, when Ian McEwan published, “Solar,” his novel about rising CO 2 levels, he admitted that “the best way to tell people about climate change is through nonfiction.” Boyle, Lydia Millet and Margaret Atwood are already preaching to the overheated choir. The weakest sections of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” are those that hector us about the loss of songbirds. And who exactly would be converted by these missing environmental stories? Are oil lobbyists just one good climate-change novel away from seeing the error of their ways?Īctually, unlike our cowardly presidential candidates, a number of major novelists have raised alarms about the Earth’s health, but novels aren’t particularly effective at articulating political positions or scientific facts.

I’d push the last polar bear off his melting ice floe to avoid that. Imagine if “most characters in most novels” lectured each other about climate change. “We don’t want to have this conversation,” complained Daniel Kramb, “and neither do most characters in most novels being published.”Īs Paul Ryan would say, the dangers of this so-called crisis are debatable.

Earlier this month, a writer in the Guardian lamented the scarcity of novels about “the most pressing and complex problem of our time”: climate change.

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