High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver. (HarperCollins, 1995)
My sister-in-law gave me this book about a year ago. I started it on vacation, but didn't get very far before we returned home and it got lost in a pile in my office. That turned out to be a happy accident: I'm not sure I would have finished it had I not been prepared by Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I love the way Barbara Kingsolver writes; as I said about the first book, even if I had found the subject dull—which I didn't—I would have enjoyed reading it.This one was a little harder. None of it was dull, but a great deal of it was maddening. With a few exceptions, such as her love of nature and her attitude towards clothing and fashion, Barbara Kingsolver and I apparently stand at opposite poles on every issue. Having read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle I know this is not entirely true, but High Tide in Tucson manages to flush out many areas of extreme disagreement. One critical example: while we share a love of and respect for children, hers leads her to support passionately governmental programs and family situations that I think, with equal passion, are downright harmful to children.
What is most frustrating is that she can be so well-educated, so intelligent, and have obviously done much research, and yet be so blind. I don't mean she's blind because she doesn't agree with me, but because she apparently can't see the humanity of her opponents. The person who excuses tobacco farmers on the grounds that they are human beings who are supporting their families in the only way they know how, nonetheless sets up her enemies as straw men and proceeds to demolish them without taking the time to get to know the reality of their lives and logic. For someone who clearly wishes to be liberal and accepting and open to new ideas, her world is curiously black and white. One either accepts every aspect of evolutionary theory lock, stock, and barrel, or else believes the world was created in six 24-hour days back in 4004 BC. One either embraces all possible combinations of people as equally legitimate forms of "family," or restricts that term to a husband and wife with two children, a boy and a girl, living isolated lives in suburbia with no room for a community of friends and neighbors or even grandparents. In Kingsolver's mind, there is apparently no substantial difference between a mother working long hours in corporate America with her children in day care, and a mother working long hours on a farm with her children (and husband) close by. And that women without "careers" have so much time on their hands they take cleaning and home decorating to unheard of heights just to keep themselves occupied! All forms of religious belief are valuable, held by reasonable people, and have something to teach us—except Christianity. Every group that calls itself a "family" is a blessing, unless that family happens to be a husband, wife, and two kids living in suburbia, with the mother working at home, in which case it's likely to be toxic and conceal child abuse and a woman on tranquilizers. Every culture is beautiful, except for Western Europe's, every country admirable except America. I'm exaggerating slightly with that last example—Iraq and Kuwait are also evil empires in her mind.
In the hands of a lesser writer, such sentiments would caused me to throw High Tide in Tucson across the room and miss the valuable parts of the book. (Really, there are some.) Fortunately, Barbara Kingsolver is not a lesser writer. Her arguments are not convincing, even when I agree with her, because her ignorance about things of which I know does not give me confidence when she covers areas in which I am clueless.
But there's no doubt the lady can write!
