Prodigal Summer

In Prodigal Summer, Nannie Rawley, during a discussion about genes and variety in sexual reproduction, says that sex is “the greatest invention life ever made” (390). The novel is bursting with illustrations of the “miracle” (390) of sex both in the natural world, and in human relationships; indeed, even the title is a reference to the “prodigal” blossoming of nature.

Prodigal Summer abounds with imagery of natural creatures, both plants and animals, calling out to their mates and creating new life. The novel begins in late spring, when mushrooms push their “bulbous heads […] up through the leaf mold, announcing the eroticism of a fecund woods at the height of spring” (20). This spring evolves into an “oversexed, muggy summer” where bullfrogs “carelessly” lay their eggs on the grass, and “just breathing was a torrid proposition” (223).

The female characters in Prodigal Summer are part of the natural world, and their bodies also call out to potential mates. Deanna tells Eddie that because she’s “fertile” (92), in the middle of her cycle, her body’s “talking to yours” (93). Similarly, when Lusa stops taking birth control pills, she notices “the men were fluttering around her like moths,” and that “she must be trailing pheromones” (230). On the other hand, female characters also mourn the loss of their fertility, as they have lost their ability to procreate. When Deanna mistakenly believes she’s beginning menopause, she feels unexpectedly “miserable” (329). Nannie tells Garnett that any surviving American chestnuts are “biologically dead. Like us” (338), and Garnett agrees, “If we consider ourselves as having no offspring” (338). In the natural world, fertility and procreation equal purpose.

Nannie also describes a more scientific aspect to the “miracle” (390) of sexual reproduction when she’s giving “the nearest thing to a birds-and-bees lecture” (390) to Deanna: in contrast to cloning, which creates only carbon copies of an organism, the sexual, “crossing type of reproduction” (389), with its mixing of different genes, allows for an infinite and ever-changing variety of life. As Deanna reflects on this lesson, she and the reader realize that Nannie is not so “biologically dead” as she believes. Nannie’s crossbred apple trees, her “outlaws from seeds never meant to be sown” (390), are Nannie’s “children” (391).

Overall, the idea of fertility and procreation not only drives the plot of Prodigal Summer, as characters like Deanna and Eddie engage in mating dances throughout the novel, but also underscores the fact that humans aren’t separate from the rest of the natural world. Like the moths, coyotes and flowers that populate the novel, its human characters call out to each other in wordless, biological messages, driven by the primal urge to create new life.

Midway through Prodigal Summer, Deanna Wolfe tells Eddie Bondo that “predation’s a sacrament” (317), and the author emphasizes the value of predators to the natural world throughout the novel. In addition, the relationships and power dynamics between predator and prey form an important aspect of the novel’s plot and character development.

In Prodigal Summer, the key predators are the coyotes newly arrived to the Zebulon Forest; Deanna is so passionate about coyotes that she wrote her graduate thesis on the animal, and she sees it as her duty to protect these animals from hunters. Of course, conflict arises when Deanna begins a sexual relationship with Eddie Bondo, a hunter who considers coyotes his “enemy” (176). Deanna believes coyotes could be a “keystone predator” (62), an animal that might revive the ecosystem and lead to a complete “reordering of species” (62), and she tries her best to make Eddie understand the importance of these animals. Predation “culls out the sick and the old, keeps populations from going through their own roofs” (317), Deanna tells Eddie, and thus the life of one predator is more valuable than many prey animals.

Even as Deanna tries to sway Eddie intellectually, the two characters engage in their own dance of predator and prey throughout the novel. Both are characterized as predators: Eddie, a hunter, is the only man capable of tracking Deanna without her knowledge, and Deanna is a “long-haired she-wolf with legs like a pinup girl” (195). As Kingsolver describes their sexual relationship, power constantly shifts between them: Deanna thinks that she “could take and own Eddie Bondo” (24), while at the same time something in Eddie “moves[s] her […] powerfully to capitulate” (198). By the end of their relationship, Deanna concludes that they are like “predator and prey closed tight in a box, waiting for word on which was to be which” (364). Eddie’s final note states that he’s “met his match” (432), although Deanna isn’t sure whether he’s referring to her or the coyotes; either way, Eddie has encountered a predator he can’t best.

While the theme of predators and prey figures most prominently in Deanna’s storyline, other characters grapple with this issue as well. Nannie and Lusa both believe that pesticides cause more harm than good because they kill the predator insects that keep the other pests in line. The Zebulon coyotes also flit, ghostlike, through various characters’ storylines. Lusa says she doesn’t want Little Rickie to kill coyotes, even if the goats she’s raising might be at risk. Garnett sees two coyotes crossing the road and sees something “magic” (393) in the animals—“they were wildness,” he realizes (393).

Prodigal Summer ends with a chapter from the coyote’s point of view, underscoring this predator’s important role in the novel. As the female coyote picks up the scent of a nearby male, the author implies that the coyote population will continue to grow, and predators will live on in the wilderness of Zebulon Mountain.