66 pages • 2 hours read
Barbara KingsolverProdigal Summer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 19-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: “Predators”
Deanna is awakened from an afternoon nap by a single gunshot and goes to investigate. Eddie’s rifle is gone from the cabin, and she fears that her “obsessive dread” has “come true” (311) and he’s shot one of the coyotes, who are now leaving the den to hunt. Eddie returns with a turkey, and Deanna is “delirious” (312) with relief. They begin to prepare the turkey for a “feast […] an extravagant event to mark this extravagant summer” (314).
Deanna and Eddie share another animated discussion about predators and prey; Deanna doesn’t object to the turkey’s death because it was a prey animal, and, as she puts it, “predation is honorable”—a way to keep “populations from going through their own roofs” (317). She warns him again about shooting a predator like a coyote, an action that affects much more than “just one life” (320). Eddie insists that Deanna will never “convert” him: “I’m a ranching boy from the West,” he says, “and hating coyotes is my religion” (323).
That night, Deanna can’t fall asleep, an unusual occurrence for her, as is napping in the daytime, which she’s been doing more frequently. Something has “gotten her out of whack” (327). She gets up and checks on the phoebe nest she’s been watching all summer, and is disturbed to find the birds missing. Then she looks for the snake that’s been living in the roof, and can see in its body “four discernible lumps” (329). Despite her earlier defense of predators, she’s struck with an “uncontrollable sorrow,” thinking that “[…] they were mine. At the end of the summer the babies are all there will be” (329).
Thinking of her strange moods and a body that feels “heavy and slow and […] absent, somehow” (329), Deanna fears she’s entering menopause and finds herself grieving. As the chapter ends, she pictures coyote pups “emerging from the forest’s womb,” even as “the finite possibilities of her own children closed their eyes, finally, on this world” (330).
Chapter 20 Summary: “Old Chestnuts”
Oda Black’s son, Jarondell, has arrived to chop up the fallen oak tree on Garnett and Nannie’s property line, and both neighbors are present to work out the division of firewood. Nannie tells Garnett the Full Gospel church has called her for help; after they killed a beehive in the church, honey is “oozing out of the walls” and coating the church floor (334). Without worker bees cooling the hive with their wings, the entire honeycomb will melt. Garnett feels himself unexpectedly warming to Nannie—she brushes cockleburs from his trousers, and he’s “strangely moved” by her kindness (335). He’s further amused when Nannie admits that, feeling the church ladies deserved the mess, she implied that God was punishing them for killing the honeybees.
Garnett notices a young chestnut sprouting from an old stump and points it out to Nannie. He explains to her that new trees still begin to grow, but the blight always kills them before they can produce seeds. So the species is “biologically dead” (338), as Nannie puts it, just like Nannie and Garnett themselves, since they won’t have any more children. Garnett is “pleased as punch” (338) when Nannie asks him about his chestnut cross-breeding project, and he’s even more excited when she mentions the two old chestnuts on her property that still produce a few seeds. Nannie thought Garnett was already aware of the trees, and she tells Garnett he can have their flowers.
Garnett has a sudden dizzy spell, something that happens to him quite often, and Nannie explains why he has them and shows him a trick to stop them, as her daughter, Rachel, had the same condition. The chapter ends with Garnett feeling new hope for his chestnut project and guilt over the green shingles he’s been hiding in his garage, as he knows Nannie needs those exact shingles to fix her roof.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Moth Love”
The chapter opens with a brief meditation on Lusa’s dreams, and that moment just before waking when she can choose to dream a happy memory of Cole, unburdened by grief. Sometimes the lover in her dreams shifts from Cole to the stranger with “silky, pale-green wings” she first imagined after the funeral, her moth lover who says he’s “always known” her (345).
As the chapter continues, Lusa is out searching for luna moths with Crys while Cry’s brother naps inside. Jewel has been very sick and has been asking Lusa to watch the children more and more often. Lusa continues to share her wealth of information about insects with Crys, who is an eager pupil. Lusa considers herself and Crys conspirators, both of them “finding their ways of living with the judgment of the righteous” (350)—i.e., the Widener family. They do find a luna, as well as many other insects. Crys reveals tidbits about the Wideners, and Lusa shares the carefully-guarded secret of how she plans to use all the goats she’s raising.
When Crys wonders why Lusa has to keep the farm, Lusa tells her it’s because of all the ghosts she senses—“people who have lost things” (257), from both Lusa’s and Cry’s families. Returning to the house, Lusa and Crys approach the garage from the back side, which Lusa hasn’t done in a while, and they discover that, as Crys puts it, “the damn booger honeysuckles et your garage” (359). Lusa remembers her argument with Cole, when she insisted there was no need to spray honeysuckles with pesticide; now she learns Cole was right when he said one has to push honeysuckle back, “or it will move in and take you over” (360). Lusa silently asks Cole to forgive her for her “city person’s audacity” (360 ), and as the chapter ends, she tells Crys that she “saw a ghost” (360).
Chapter 22 Summary: “Predators”
Deanna is out working while Eddie reads her thesis and she hasn’t “felt this nervous since the day of her final oral defense” (362). Deanna considers that her body wants Eddie to stay, while her mind wants him to leave, leaving her with an “agitation, the likes of which[she] have never known in all[her] life” (363). Deanna has been unusually exhausted and emotional lately; that morning, she found herself weeping, and “the forest hadn’t seemed large enough for her grief” (363).
Thunder booms overhead, and Deanna runs back to the cabin, as thunder is one of the few things she’s scared of. When she reaches the cabin, she sees something moving out of the cabin wall, and realizes it’s the snake who’s been both “angel” and “devil” all summer long (364), keeping away the mice and killing the phoebes. Deanna considers that just as whether she “loved or hated the snake” makes no difference (365), whether she wants Eddie to stay or go also has no ultimate meaning in a world “with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction” (365).
Chapter 23 Summary: “Old Chestnuts”
Garnett visits Nannie to offer him the shingles that will fit her roof perfectly, but when he finds her, he’s put off by her sleeveless blouse and shorts, which he considers “indecent exposure” (368). He notices she has “the legs of a much younger woman” (370-71), and recalls the dream he had about her which left him uncomfortably aroused. The two share some banter about the strength of weeds, and Garnett finally thanks Nannie for the pie she gave him, but all along he’s fixating on those “short pants, on a woman of her age” (370), until he finally gives in and comments on the “immodest” outfit (371).
In response, Nannie asks Garnett to finally tell her what he’s “really got against” her (371) after all these years, and he finds he doesn’t really know. He settles for telling Nannie “you don’t act normal for your age” (372), and Nannie counters that there “isn’t any normal way to act” for a 75-year-old (372), since humans weren’t biologically intended to live so long. When Nannie mentions her “old shriveled ninnies” and Garnett’s “whatever you’ve got under there” (373), Garnett becomes “so hot under the collar” that he storms off (373).
An hour later, Garnett returns with one heart-shaped shingle, and tells Nannie he can have the matching 200 in his garage. As the chapter ends, Nannie declares his offering “a miracle” (373).
Chapter 24 Summary: “Moth Love”
On Sunday afternoon, Jewel comes to Lusa’s farm to collect Crys and Lowell—they’ve been staying with Lusa frequently as Jewel grows even sicker. Jewel admires Lusa’s garden, and Lusa describes some of the natural alternatives to pesticide she uses. Jewel remarks that Cole was also interested in “how to poison things without using poison” (376), and Lusa explains that they met when he took her University of Kentucky class on the subject.
Jewel suddenly falls to the ground amid the tomato plants, racked with pain, and Lusa nearly has to carry her inside. Jewel tells Lusa that “I’m not going to see another summer” (379), and Lusa tentatively offers to adopt Jewel’s children. She adds that she loves them, and she and Crys are “two peas in a pod” (381), and Jewel agrees that Lusa would be the best option to raise her challenging daughter. Jewel promises to send the papers to her ex-husband asking him to give up all custody of the children, a task she’s been putting off for a while now.
Lusa says that she’d like to add “Widener” to Crys’s and Lowell’s farm—she’s taking the name as well—and leave the farm to them. Lusa concludes that she’s “married to a piece of land named Widener” (383), and now she can make sure the Widener’s legacy remains in the family. Jewel says that with this solution, she and her sisters “will all praise the Lord” (384).
Chapters 19-24 Analysis
These chapters again open with the idea of fertility and procreation, as Deanna becomes more aware of her shifting moods, cravings, and frequent exhaustion, and believes she is entering menopause. When she discovers the phoebe fledglings she’s been watching over have been devoured by a snake, her grief for the birds becomes grief for her own children, whom she believes will never be born. Returning to thoughts of the coyote pups “emerging from the forest’s womb” (330), Deanna mourns the end of her own procreative ability, and for a rare moment, she sees herself as separate from the natural, abundant world.
In Deanna’s next chapter, she acknowledges that she’s become entangled in the human emotions that separate her from nature, and that ultimately nature will run its course, regardless of her feelings. Her thoughts are prompted by the sight of the snake that’s been living in her cabin walls all summer finally leaving—another echo of the predator theme throughout the novel. Deanna, now more emotional than in the past, sees the snake as “angel” and “devil” (364), chasing away mice and slaughtering fledglings. But she realizes that she’s placing human qualifications on a world “with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction” (365), and that this world will persist however her relationship with Eddie turns out. Thus, the author reminds readers that nature is greater than any human attempts to control it, and even Deanna and Eddie’s predator-prey relationship is a part of the natural world.
Like Deanna, Nannie and Rawley continue to grapple with the loss of their procreative ability in these chapters. Nannie says that the American chestnut is “biologically dead. Like us” (338): without the ability to pass on its genes, a being has lost its life, its purpose. However, Nannie and Garnett certainly aren’t giving in to despair in these chapters, but rather reaching out to each other with new kindness. In fact, the pair’s relationship undergoes a major shift in this section, progressing from smaller gestures that touch Garnett despite himself, like Nannie brushing burrs off his clothes, to a greater intimacy. When Garnett has a dizzy spell, he allows Nannie to hold “his head in her competent, tender grip like a mother” (341). A new connection forms between the two, and Garnett resolves to return Nannie’s kindness by giving her the shingles for her roof.
As the section continues, Nannie’s and Garnett’s connection becomes an increasingly sexual one—apparently, even these older characters aren’t immune to the prodigal summer’s influence. Garnett notices Nannie’s legs under her scandalous “short pants” (370) and is aroused despite himself, and their exchange leaves him “hot under the collar” (373). Here, Kingsolver again emphasizes the instinctual sexual urges that mark humans as part of the natural world, and she guides Nannie and Garnett’s relationship from animosity, through kindness, and into an entirely new direction.
In Lusa’s chapters of this section, she continues to develop her relationship with Crys: both are outsiders in the Widener clan and “finding their ways of living with the judgment of the righteous” (350). When it becomes clear that Jewel’s cancer is terminal, Lusa offers to adopt Crys and her brother. As the member of the Widener family most suited to raise this difficult, unconventional girl, Lusa has finally found her purpose among the Wideners. She also acknowledges the importance of keeping the farm in the Widener name—of honoring all those Widener ghosts she’s lived among the previous months—as she plans to leave the farm to Crys and Lowell, and add “Widener” to her own last name.
The ghost motif is also developed further in these chapters, as Lusa finally articulates what these ghosts represent while attempting to explain them to Crys. Lusa says the ghosts are “people who have lost things” (357)—including her own ancestors, who have lost their land. By reclaiming the Widener farm for herself, and for Crys and Lowell after her, Lusa has found a way to honor her own ancestral ghosts as well as the Widener ones.
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