No small potatoes.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: All Over Creation - The Botany of Desire - Book Review

All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki Viking, 2003. 417 pages. $24.95.

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan Random House, 2001. 271 pages. $24.95 (hardcover). Random House, 2002. 304 pages. $13.95 (paperback).

Ruth Ozeki is an antidote to all the vapid, consumer-oriented "chick lit" thrown at women these days. She creates characters that are concerned with more than tracking their cigarette habits. In Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meats (Penguin, 1998), the protagonist is an independent filmmaker who learns much more than she wanted about the meat industry. In her second novel, Ozeki takes on genetically engineered potatoes. Her characters wrestle with an essential question: Who controls life?

In All Over Creation, she spins a tale about life and death on the American farm--in this case, a family of potato farmers in Idaho. The novel starts with the story of Yumi Fuller, a fourteen-year-old girl who has an abortion. Her father, Lloyd, can't forgive her for that transgression against life and against God. She runs away. Twenty-five years later, Yumi is forced to return home to care for her aging parents. Momoko, her mother, has grown too senile to care for the two of them, and passes her days in the garden, talking to the plants in Japanese. Lloyd's heart condition continues to worsen.

Yumi has to make gut-wrenching decisions about Lloyd's care while she watches her mother slip away. And she must also decide the fate of her parents' small, mail-order seed company.

For fifteen years, the Fullers have sold a large variety of seeds, all of them open-pollinated. In his catalogues, Lloyd propagates his agricultural beliefs alongside heirloom cultivars. He thinks genetic engineering is yet another transgression against God. "Terminator" technology, the ability to create seeds that produce sterile offspring, violates Creation, he says. Only God can create (and take away) life.

In the middle of these familial difficulties, a small group of radical environmentalists shows up at the farm. The Seeds of Resistance, as the five anti-biotechnology activists call themselves, travel around the country in a vehicle called the "Spudnik," an RV that they've modified to run on french fry oil ("bio-diesel"). After stumbling across a catalogue, the Seeds realize they must visit Lloyd Fuller. The Seeds cannot resist the appeal of this small, righteous potato farmer, "defending his seed against the hubris and rapacious greed of the...