Stan Rice has just published another novel Blue Wild Indigo in the series Under the Sun, which explores what, if anything, God is doing in this world under the sun: first, from the viewpoint of the poet who lived at the time of King Solomon, and wrote Ecclesiastes (Among the Lilies); next, from the viewpoint of the woman who loved the prophet Jeremiah (The Almond Branch); next, from Heloïse and Abélard in medieval France (Paraclete); finally, this novel, set in modern rural Oklahoma.
Here is the author’s summary from Amazon:
All her life, Sophia is inconvenient. She thinks too much and everybody knows it. She escapes twice from her Amish community in rural Oklahoma and discovers how dangerous and costly love and wisdom can be. The first time, she leaves with Clay. They find that the outside world is worse than their Amish community and they return, join church, and marry. Sophia’s second departure—with its risk of shunning—is not so easy. She takes refuge with Gil, a famous, lonely theologian, who is escaping his own past. But by hiding in Gil’s house, Sophia has exchanged one set of restrictions for another. Sophia’s brilliance shocks Gil into rethinking everything he thinks he knows, as he helps Sophia recreate herself. Their love grows as deeply as the roots of the blue wild indigo, a long-lived prairie flower. As Clay stalks Sophia, she and Gil discover that love is worth even the risk of death. Only after this experience are Sophia and Gil free.
This is how the novel begins:
Her eyes. It was her eyes that shot out at me, barbed me, and reeled me in. She made me feel like a fish who thought that because he understood the water he understood the world, only to find that he did not even understand the water. She left me flopping on the floor. Even now I do not know whether she intended to capture me or if I just blundered into the circle of her light.
This is a book for which the author chose not to seek commercial publication. The reason is obvious. There are thousands of works of fiction about the Amish, but almost all of them are written by Amish for Amish, which means the plot is almost the same for all of them: young Amish people experiment with the outside world, during their period of rumspringa, and find out that life is better back home. Almost nobody outside the Amish religion wants to read fiction about Amish, unless it depicts them as ignorant, backward, stupid people. But there is not even very much published fiction about this, because a reader grows weary of a writer that just heaps abuse upon people he or she considers boring.
What Rice has done is to write a novel about a brilliant, therefore inconvenient, Amish woman, who needs to leave her community even while she continues to love it.
The format of the book includes chapters written from first the viewpoint of Sophia, then of Gil, filling in their background stories—the stories that were too sensitive for them to actually tell one another about, so they wrote them down, often in the second person. The whole book has passages of very creative format. Chapter 4 of Part one consists of a shopping receipt, which reveals Gil’s mental struggles as he prepares for Sophia.
The first thing to note, regarding Sophia and Gil, the main characters, is that their meeting brings disruptive discoveries. Scientists and theologians alike must be ready for disruptions to come along. Perhaps Gil thought he was living in peace away from religious and academic strife in a country house, but he had all of his assumptions challenged when he met Sophia (from the Greek word for wisdom). She is a fiercely intelligent Amish woman, who grew up in central central Oklahoma. She had chosen a life (fundamentalism) that Gil assumed people only got forced into by their circumstances. And then, when she walked all night to find his house and simply assumed that he was going to let her move in with him. Two disruptions to his thinking. Gil assumed that the Amish were not too smart; but then again, natural selection favored their mild way of thinking, which spelled social and family success for them, so maybe it was an intelligent choice on their part. Sophia wandering into Gil’s life disrupted him forever.
But Sophia was not mindlessly fundamentalist. She chose her life after constantly challenging the assumptions of her family and church, about history and science. Church leaders know this is going to happen, and they allow a period of rumspringa in which Amish youths can try out the sinful world in order to find out for themselves that a life of family and church love is much better. But the running and springing around of rumspringa did not include freedom of thought. The young folks could smoke and drink, but they were not allowed to freely read or to go to college. Sophia had to go out into the world with her boyfriend Clay, and they both found out how the sinful world can degrade you.
Sophia experiences disruption when she, by chance, meets Gil. The more she does things with him, such as an environmental protest, the more she finds that her previous experiences have prepared her for him. She was already an environmentalist without realizing it. Organized environmentalism gives her a new purpose in her life. She finds a mental soul-mate in Gil and her life, also, is disrupted forever.
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