Prodigal Summer.

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver HarperCollins. 464 pages. $26.00.

There's no shortage of writers who weave environmental themes into their work. Ever since Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It or Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall (two novels that became huge successes with the help of Brad Pitt movies), the rural landscape has become an increasingly popular motif among American novelists.

While many of our best writers (Rick Bass, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx) handle the rural landscape in integral and poignant ways, other novelists use it as mere backdrop (big developer comes to small town, big city drifter comes to small town, big bear comes to small town). What results is often a cliched sentiment about the rural nether-regions of our land and the gritty struggles and triumphs of the human spirit that occur there (the recent, over-hyped novels Plainsong, by Kent Haruf, and Winter Range, by Claire Davis, come to mind).

In many of these works, there is little urgency. This could be because most of the M.F.A. writing programs in this country disdain political or social themes, lest the message dilute the art.

This is why I am overjoyed by the two new novels by Barbara Kingsolver and Wendell Berry. These writers possess a gift for spinning seamless, moving narratives, and they are living proof that a social conscience and stunning fiction can co-exist in the same book.

Three basic threads run through Kingsolver's new novel, Prodigal Summer. First is the tale of naturalist Deanna Wolfe, who lives in isolation in the mountains of southern Appalachia, not far from the farm in Zebulon County where she was raised. Second is the story of Lusa Maluf Landowski, an academic from Lexington who, after a fiery courtship, finds herself a farmer's wife in Zebulon County, and soon after, a farmer's widow. Third is the relationship between two elderly neighbors, retired teacher and 4-H adviser Garnett Walker and organic farmer Nannie Rawley, who are involved in a longstanding feud over the uses and maintenance of the land.

As is Kingsolver's wonderful gift, the narratives of the three main characters are complex and multilayered, but they all must learn the same lessons: the need for human community, the dignity in working the land, the amazing capacity of nature to succeed on its own.

The novel begins with these wonderful lines: "Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed."

Like many authors dealing with social issues, Kingsolver occasionally falls prey to heavy-handedness. Her first chapters indicate a book that might drift into cliches: While in the woods, isolated middle-aged biologist meets young coyote hunter, who happens to be amazingly gifted in the sack; lonely academic researcher meets strapping young farmer; aging, hippie, organic farmer has feud with aging, simpleton Christian who uses pesticides on anything he can.

But Kingsolver turns these rural archetypes into vivid characters. The story is as page-turning as it is profound.

It's possible that the few weaknesses in Kingsolver's novel were apparent only because I began reading Prodigal Summer on the heels of finishing Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow. Berry, a poet, essayist, novelist, and farmer, is still at the top of his game.

Like several of Berry's earlier novels, Jayber Crow is set in the small, rural community of Port William, Kentucky. Born to a farming family there, Jayber Crow is orphaned at a young age when his parents die in the influenza outbreak of 1918. His aunt and uncle adopt him but die when Jayber is ten years old. He's sent to an orphanage, decides to become a minister, has a faith crisis, and drifts from town to town. Then, in his early twenties, he returns to Port William and sets up shop as the town barber, a position he holds for most of his adult life.

Jayber is the big-hearted narrator of the story, which revolves around his unspoken love for Mattie Chatham, a woman married to someone else. Jayber Crow would be a fine and powerful tale if it were simply a story of unrequited love and of one man's affectionate observations of his hometown. But this novel strives for something greater, becoming nothing less than a sad and sweeping elegy for the idea of community, a horrifying signal of what we lost in the twentieth century in the name of economic and social progress.

"The new way of farming was a way of dependence, not on land and creatures and neighbors, but on machines and fuel and chemicals of all sorts, bought things, and on the sellers of bought things--which made it finally a dependence on credit," Jayber says. "The odd thing was, people just assumed that all the purchasing and borrowing would merely make life easier and better on all the little farms. Most people didn't dream that before long a lot of little farmers would buy and borrow their way out of farming, and bigger and bigger farmers would be competing with their neighbors (or with doctors from the city) for available land. The time was going to come--it was clear enough now--when there would not be enough farmers left."

Berry makes us wonder whether it is too late to reverse what we've done to our landscapes, our communities, our family farms.

Near the end of the book, Jayber Crow says, "This is a book about Heaven, but I must say too that it has been a close call. For I have wondered sometimes if it would not turn out to be a book about Hell--where we fail to love one another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly provided or for righteousness's sake or for pleasure, where we destroy the things we need the most, where we see no hope and have no faith ... where we must lose everything to know what we have had."

In his essay "In Distrust of Movements" (first published in Orion magazine and recently collected in Houghton Mifflin's Best American Essays 2000), Berry writes that well-intentioned nonprofits and researchers cannot solve the current ecological crisis: "What I have been talking about is the possibility of renewing human respect for the Earth and all the good, useful, and beautiful things that come from it.... I don't think this respect can be adequately enacted or conveyed by tipping our hats to nature or by representing natural loveliness in art or by prayers of thanksgiving or by preserving tracts of wilderness--although I recommend all those things. The respect I mean can be given only by using well the world's goods that are given to us."

This is what both Kingsolver and Berry are telling us: The solution to the ecological crisis we are experiencing must come from a change in human consciousness, one individual at a time. If Berry's novel is an elegy for what we've lost, Kingsolver's aims to be a blueprint for finding it again.

Out of the wreck we've created--dozens of family farms disappearing daily, factory farms poisoning our watersheds, the widespread use of chemicals, growth hormones, and genetic engineering in our food sources, the decimation of rural landscapes in fits of urban sprawl--must come an overall shifting of how we think about the resources we consume and the land that sustains us.

Such a shifting may seem far-fetched. But I imagine to an observer at the peak of the Industrial Revolution the future seemed equally bleak. A progressive pessimist could have foreseen a future where children would eventually be enslaved within factories, all workers would work sixteen-hour days, and health and safety conditions would be treacherous.

But people resisted this fate. Child labor advocates, union organizers, and environmentalists have bettered the situation, and have done so not just by legislative means but by a shifting in human consciousness. (And good fiction, like that of Charles Dickens or Upton Sinclair, was instrumental in causing this shift.)

Both Kingsolver and Berry demand that we consider what true progress is and insist that we weigh the disappearance of family farms and the destruction of habitat. Their lament is that we no longer raise the animals or plant the crops we consume, we don't depend on the land, and we don't rely on our neighbors for help.

Ultimately, superficial independence is dangerous, which is why the messages contained in these novels are so urgent.

The vision presented by Berry and Kingsolver--living simply, farming sustainably, consuming prudently, and engaging in community--is not a fashionable one. But we are lost without it.

Dean Bakopoulos is a writer based in Madison, Wisconsin. He reviewed "Close Range" by Annie Proulx in the September 1999 issue.