Jayber Crow.

• Author: Bakopoulos, Dean

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry Counterpoint. 384 pages. $25.00.

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...