For me, reading a well-loved book that I’ve turned to time and time again feels like meeting up with an old friend. Even if things haven’t changed much since you’ve last seen her, the new details you learn are refreshing, and her presence comforting. In contrast, reading a new book feels a lot like a first date. You judge based on the cover and a brief synopsis, and you’re really hoping for the best, but sometimes things just don’t work out. A few years ago, I had a “first date” with a book that I was not hopeful for; it was literary fiction, and I was a teenager who thought anything that didn’t include magic and dragons was categorically boring. But from the first page, I was completely hooked. I want to recommend The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver as motivation for tepid genre fiction enthusiasts to have a crack at something new.
The Bean Trees was my first real introduction to literary fiction that was outside of school reading and introduced me to Barbara Kingsolver, who is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I love Kingsolver so much that my senior thesis is about her latest novel, Demon Copperhead, which I’ve reviewed previously. The Bean Trees is about a woman named Taylor who moves out west and, in the process, unexpectedly adopts an abandoned baby girl, whom she names Turtle. The novel generally is about the struggles Taylor faces with settling herself in a new place while caring for her daughter, her own struggle to accept herself as a mother, and learning to conceive of a real future for herself.
I think reading literary fiction is different from reading genre fiction. Not in some pretentious way where one is better than the other, but rather, I feel like there’s much less pressure to dazzle and astonish the audience. When I read fantasy or science fiction, I’m often caught up in the world, in the unfamiliar. The technology/magic and the strange place with unfamiliar peoples and cultures captivate my imagination and attention, and often at the cost of my caring about the characters or the adventure they’re on. Of course, it’s not a hard and fast rule, that’s just where my attention drifts, because when an author chooses to tell a story in a world different from ours, there tends to be a good reason for it. Literary fiction then feels closer to home. I may have never lived in Arizona, but I can understand where Arizona fits in my conceptions of our world. My mind draws from what it already knows to place these fictional people in my own world — it’s intimate, and it makes me care about the characters much more. In my experience, a real setting makes characters feel more real to me, and I care about real people’s problems. It’s that feeling afterwards, when you’re processing a story, and the thought hits you that there are probably people who are just like that, who went through similar problems, who maybe are still going through it, and perhaps aren’t as lucky as our main characters of these stories so often are.
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver is a great work of literary fiction, and is honestly a real tear-jerker of a book, which for me is a plus. I fully recommend this book to anyone who’s interested with no reservations about it.
