“Pigs in Heaven” is full of miracles, especially the kind that start out-like Turtle’s life-as disasters. At the beginning of the novel, Turtle and Taylor are on a trip to the Hoover Dam, where Turtle is the only person to see a man fall over the side. Taylor finally persuades someone to believe her daughter, and the rescue makes Turtle a heroine. But becoming a heroine, which culminates in an appearance on “Oprah,” engenders a new disaster. Annawake Fourkiller, an Indian-rights lawyer, sees the white mother with her Cherokee daughter on TV and decides the child must be returned to the Cherokee Nat Fourkiller has a personal stake in the issue: years earlier her brother was adopted by a white family. She also has the law on her side, for according to a recent Supreme Court ruling, no Indian child can be adopted out of the tribe without its consent. But Taylor isn’t about to let go of the little girl who clings to her mother’s hand as if to life itself. They pack up and run.
Kingsolver’s fans will remember Taylor and Turtle from her wonderful first novel, “The Bean Trees” (1988). Her equally wonderful second novel, “Animal Dreams” (1990), took up a different cast of characters-two visionary sisters from tiny Grace, Ariz.-but retained the savvy wit, the political edge and the unabashed sentiment that make her books so satisfying. With “Pigs in Heaven” Kingsolver takes a risk she hasn’t taken before: she challenges her own strong, ’60s-style politics by pitting its cultural correctness against the boundless love between a mother and child. For all its political dimensions, this is no polemic but a complex drama in which heroes and villains play each other’s parts-and learn from them. Fourkiller, though passionate in her belief that Turtle belongs with her own people, understands the damage that would be done if the law had its way. And Taylor, for her part, begins to understand the power of Turtle’s connection to her past.
There are no perfect solutions to the conflict Kingsolver sets up here, and the denouement relies on a somewhat unwieldy coincidence. But while it is less deftly plotted than her first two novels, “Pigs in Heaven” succeeds on the strength of Kingsolver’s clear-eyed, warmhearted writing and irresistible characters. There’s Barbie, for instance, a waitress obsessed with Barbie dolls. She even dresses like one, in grown-up doll clothes she makes herself. And Alice, Taylor’s mother, who has gone through two marriages wondering if there are any men at all who talk. Her current husband is so devoted to silence that he not only ignores her, he watches TV all day with the sound off. And there’s Taylor, as smart and funny this time around as she was in “The Bean Trees” but with a new vulnerability born of her devotion to Turtle. Taylor is wonderfully tough-minded-too much so for her own good, perhaps, but she doesn’t know how to be any other way until Turtle teaches her. Very few novelists are as habitforming as Kingsolver, so if her work is new to you, go ahead and get all three books. Read them in any order; they bloom no matter what.
