Barbara Kingsolver Discusses Appalachia and the Healing Power of Art

Appalachian culture has been trending on social media recently, with viral videos focusing on the folklore and superstition of the region, an ancient mountain system that stretches almost 2500 kilometres across 13 states from eastern Canada to Alabama. Most are designed to creep viewers out, with atmospheric footage of ancient forests, warnings about shapeshifting monsters in the mountains, and advice such as “never whistle at night”.

Author Barbara Kingsolver, one of Appalachia’s most celebrated contemporary writers, has heard them all before. “And you don’t say thank you when someone gives you a plant, or it will die,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in southwestern Virginia. “I don’t know about social media, but that’s just … life. What’s fun about Appalachia is that we are a very distinct culture in the US, for better and for worse, even though we have endured a lot of condescension.”

Hillbillies, rednecks, hicks and the more recent “deplorables” – Kingsolver has heard them all, but she’s long been a fierce champion for Appalachian pride, using her books and community advocacy to challenge long-held cultural stereotypes. Her 2022 novel Demon Copperhead, an Appalachian reimagining of Charles Dickens’ 1850 classic David Copperfield, is credited with increasing people’s awareness of and empathy for the region’s culture, particularly the systemic poverty and its decimation by the opioid crisis. The novel also sold millions, was critically acclaimed, and won a slew of prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Her much-anticipated follow-up is again set largely in Appalachia, this time in Tennessee farm country. Partita (the name given to a musical suite made up of contrasting dance movements), is the story of Livia Cable, who lives a quiet life in the farming community she grew up in; she’s married to Charlie, and they share duties on their small dairy farm, while Livia also teaches piano to school students. Then she receives a phone call from a former lover that threatens to upend her life.

Livia was once Livia Bohusz, a gifted pianist haunted by the death of her brother, Cyrus, when she was 11 years old. After his death, Livia’s parents withdrew into silence and music became her solace. When she won a scholarship to a prestigious music conservatory, she could see a future beyond her stultifying home life, even if she felt at a remove from her more urbane classmates. She found a nice musician boyfriend, learned to tamp down her “hillbilly” accent, and set her sights on a career as a concert pianist. But it was all derailed by an encounter with a man with “shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, muscles you wouldn’t miss in the rearview”.

Without giving anything away, this passionate romance changes the trajectory of Livia’s entire life.

Before she was a novelist, Kingsolver was a science journalist, and before that, she studied piano on a music scholarship – but Partita is not, she says, autobiographical in any way. “I don’t write about myself,” she says. “Obviously writers draw on our experiences to some extent, but … my books are never about me.”

As someone who studied piano for years, and has lugged a piano from house to house for more than 20 years without tuning it, I was inspired by Kingsolver’s novel to get back to the keyboard – even though I’m nowhere near Livia’s playing level. “That makes me really happy,” Kingsolver says. “And I have never played at the level of Livia, either. I was good, but she’s great; she could have been a concert pianist.”

Kingsolver still plays, but like her protagonist, cannot play the piece that forms the centre of the book, Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. Mind you, it’s said that Ravel himself couldn’t even play it himself. “Isn’t that something, that he composed pieces that he could not play himself? Maybe he wasn’t really doing it for himself - he was doing it for us, 100 years later,” she marvels. “That’s the remarkable thing about artists; they get to live forever.”

While Partita is a story of a Livia’s life, it’s also a paean to music and art. “It ponders the question, what good is art? Why do we need it? Why do we keep coming back to it year after year, century after century,” Kingsolver says. “There’s something in us that craves beauty, from the first cave painting on a wall … and I think about music, I think that the very earliest humans must have been singing.”

Art and music, she says, are primal. “My novels always ask big questions and I think it’s worth interrogating in modern times when I think economic struggle kind of forces us into practical decisions, and in times of global recession, we’re running past the days when we thought we had everything and there was an endless supply of everything.”

As people start to pare down, she says, it’s often the arts that get cut. “I don’t know the story in Australia but in the US, our government cut funding for the arts at every level from the National Endowment for the Humanities down to grade school art programs and music programs,” she says. “I think it’s time to ask ourselves, what is the nutritional value of art? Because clearly, there is something in art that we crave, that heals us, that helps us to process our feelings. That’s a big question in this novel.”

Kingsolver says Partita started as a simple love story involving a musician, but grew to encompass not just romantic love, but that human longing for art. At the same time she had the idea for the title, she also decided to write the novel as a musical composition.

“Even though when people asked me what I was working on, I’d have to explain what ‘partita’ means, I thought it was perfect – it’s a musical composition made of different parts, and the challenge for the performer is to put them all together and create something whole out of these disparate parts that include really sad movements and happy movements, and sex movements.”

Which is life, really? “Absolutely. That’s what this book really is.” She was also inspired by a quote from fellow novelist Toni Morrison, which opens the book: “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt.”

“I happened to run across it in the early stages of writing, and it is one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard said about all of our lives. We get broken, time and again, in big ways and little ways, and the grandeur of life is in that attempt to survive with whatever pieces we have left. So that quote and the idea of writing it as a partita all come together. I love it when I get the architecture of a story, and then I can just go to town.”

The novel also comes with a playlist for each chapter, and for the audiobook, Kingsolver hired a pianist to record several of the pieces, which are embedded into the narrative. But she also emphasises that nonmusical types need not be intimidated. “I would say that just as you don’t have to have spent time on a whaling ship to understand Moby Dick, you don’t have to be a musician or even love classical music to love this book because there’s plenty of other stuff. There’s sex, and all kinds of love – passionate love, spiritual love, love of the arts, love of music. I think one of the wonderful things about a novel is that it can take us into a world that is entirely unknown to us.”

And for most of her readers, that includes Appalachian culture. “It’s really important to me to represent my place and my people as Appalachian because – and this extends to rural people in the US, and I’ll bet it extends to Australia – movies, television, our newspapers, our magazines, are all made in cities by people who live in cities. Rural people and our lives are pretty much invisible in our popular culture. And so this is my job: to put my people and my place on the map in a book and in the public discourse.”

I’ve always thought the fact that much of America is routinely referred to as “flyover states” must feel quite insulting? “I hear it every day of my life! Well-intended friends ask me things like, ‘Are there people around there you want to be friends with?’ Or the notion that I live in the middle of nowhere. This is my everywhere. We also have culture. We have colleges, we have trees. I have a garden up there that feeds my family,” Kingsolver says.

“Demon Copperhead was famously an Appalachian book, and I set out to tell the great Appalachian story, including all the bad things that have been done to our region over time. But this is another kind of Appalachian book. Livia is every bit as Appalachian as Demon, but he has a different kind of life. Livia grew up on a dairy farm, and her family do not think of themselves as poor – they’re working-class people. Yes, very few of her friends go to college, but they’re a very normal kind of Appalachian family.”

And while the book touches on issues specific to Appalachian culture, it’s also a broader exploration of the importance of art and music and the diminishing importance placed on the arts that resonates everywhere.

“My answer is not to get depressed, but to do something about it,” Kingsolver says. “And what I can do is write a novel that sends people back to their pianos.”

Partita (Faber Fiction) is out now.

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