One day Dellarobia Turnbow climbs the side of her mountain on her family's property in eastern Tennessee, intending on an illicit rendezvous with a man who is not her husband, but something stops her first: the mountain is on fire. Or, at least, that's the way it seems. Later she discovers that what she's seen is not fire but an enormous cluster of monarch butterflies who have settled on the mountain, diverted somehow from their traditional wintering home in Mexico.
The monarchs intrude upon Dellarobia's life: They contemplate her family's plan to cut down the mountain's trees for money. Tourists come, and she becomes a minor celebrity. Scientists come, living on the Turnbow property to study this unusual event. Some changes are good and some are bad; most lie somewhere in between. And even though Kingsolver is careful to keep her representatives of science cautious in their claims, her metaphors make it clear--such upheavals can only be the result of global warming. What Dellarobia undergoes is, quite literally, a sea change.
Kingsolver seems to have two goals here: One, to illustrate the way climate change can affect an individual human life, to rescue it from abstraction. Two, to bridge the gap between the academic and the regular Joe, and illustrate the possibility of common ground between them. I'm not sure she succeeds in this second goal; while Kingsolver clearly writes out of great affection for the salt-of-the-earth types that make up Dellarobia's community, she doesn't wholly avoid the temptation to skewer them as rubes. For instance, Dellarobia convinces her husband and father-in-law (Cub and Bear, respectively) to take one last look at the land before signing the logging contract, without telling them about the butterflies, which leads to an absurd plot point in which Cub announces at church that Dellarobia foresaw them in a vision. This ensues:
Dellarobia felt the doubtful stares. She'd been sitting it out every week in the cafe, drinking coffee and making her grocery list, in no way deserving of a miracle. And yet a small shatter of applause broke out, like a handful of gravel on a tin shed. Someone very close to them shouted: "Heaven be praised, Sister Turnbow has seen the wonders!" It was the man who'd come in late, with the sporty sunglasses on his head.
The sunglasses, the out-of-place folksiness of "Sister Turnbow" and "seen the wonders," which are somehow incongruent with the casualness of the church and its cafe, and the sheer stupidity everyone in this scene seems to share--they add up to something that isn't the friendly ribbing that I think Kingsolver is aiming at. Contrast the character of the scientist, Ovid Byron, who is described as "Tall, dark, and handsome, but extra tall, extra dark. Okay, extra all three."
Is it a surprise when Dellarobia falls in love? Kingsolver chooses to make Byron an immigrant from the US Virgin Islands, who Dellarobia thinks sounds like a "reggae singer." In other words, she amplifies his otherness, emphasizing his status as an outsider--while fetishizing his exoticness, something which Kingsolver seems to share with Dellarobia. There are good narrative reasons to do this, as there are good reasons to satirize casual fundamentalists in sporty sunglasses, but when you do them both the novel is thrown off balance. In other words, I don't think Flight Behavior represents both sides as equally as it thinks it does.
But I do like the point that Dellarobia makes about the impossible divide between these two camps when she theorizes to Byron that the problem is essentially social, that the reason her community does not believe in global warming has less to do with stupidity or cowardice than the human tendency to divide itself in two. "The environment," as she says, "got assigned to the other team." She goes on:
"These positions get assigned to people," she said. "If you've been called the bad girl all your life, you figure you're already paying the price, you should go on and use the tickets. If I'm the redneck in the pickup, fine, let me just go burn up the some gas."
The enmity between the believers and the skeptics, that is, precedes even the belief itself. Yet, is Kingsolver aware of the ways in which the novel unconsciously preserves that divide, instead of breaking it down?
Flight Behavior is strongest, I think, when it focuses on the first goal: creating a vivid depiction of an individual life who comes to see the upheaval of her life as part of a larger, global phenomenon. The butterflies are a powerful metaphor that dominates the work. Like Dellarobia, they are lost, confused, struggling to survive against impersonal forces that are much stronger. We want the butterflies to make it because of their beauty and mystery, and because if they do perhaps that implies that Dellarobia too can make it, that she too can "[fly] out to a new earth."