![]() ![]() He found her work so reverential of liberal sentiment, so much in awe of the plights of the disenfranchised, that it “place the supremely empathetic author in a protected niche, far beyond the reader’s capacity to criticize.” In other words, Kingsolver just cares so, so deeply for the world that you’d have to be a monster, or at least a little gauche, to rip her for shoddy prose or flat characters. ![]() In a long, mildly unhinged 1999 essay on Barbara Kingsolver’s career-cementing novel, The Poisonwood Bible, critic Lee Siegel canonized the author as “the most successful practitioner of a style in contemporary fiction that might be called Nice Writing.” It wasn’t a compliment. ![]()
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