Marxist propagandists come to college campuses to target the children of conservative working classes. They destroy the capacity of the young generation of normal Americans to engage in both productive and reproductive work. These Marxists deprive America of its future by crippling its children and making them barren. The beautiful world of people in such places as rural Tennessee, with its happy homeschooling families and large clans, rootedness, and tradition is being unmade in the service of a futile dream of a communist revolution. This is what Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel Partita is about.
Kingsolver’s previous novel, Demon Copperhead, is the second-best American novel written this century, after Emma Cline’s The Guest. Of course, I had to check out her new book the moment it came out. Kingsolver’s mega bestseller The Poisonwood Bible is ridiculously bad on every level, and I was wondering whether Partita would revert to the talentless hackery of early Kingsolver or live up to the brilliance of the writer’s recent work.
Why do so many young Americans allow the revolutionary fervor of leftism to rob them of their capacity to create and procreate? Partita makes it clear that this happens because leftism invites them to pursue physical pleasure as the only important thing in life. Of course, when the consequences hit, explains the novel, you will find out that your friendly leftist organizer who promised you heaven on Earth has moved on to another facile mark and you get to eat the consequences on your own. Or, if you are a pretty girl, like the main character of Partita, you can get some innocent and reliable country boy to eat them for you. You can rob him of love, devotion, and children, as well as of ever knowing that he can’t have them because a bored Marxist propagandist casually had and discarded them first.
Yeah, I know. Even after Demon Copperhead, I didn’t expect all this from Kingsolver. Partita is a talented novelistic rendering of the manosphere theory about hypergamous women who debase themselves for Alpha chads. The chads discard them, so the women scrounge up some sad Beta provider they entrap in a sexless marriage because all their passion had gone to Alpha chads. It will never stop being entertaining that Barbara Kingsolver produced a talented manosphere novel.
And a talented novel it is. Very different from Demon Copperhead and not on the same level. But still great. Kingsolver should stop trying to massage every storyline into a saccharine happy ending. It’s unlikely she’ll ever manage that but who knows? She grew enormously from her terrible early work to these excellent two novels.
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