SOURCE: “Going Native,” in New York Times Book Review, October 18, 1998, p. 7.

In the following review, Klinkenborg offers positive evaluation of The Poisonwood Bible.

The phrase “heart of darkness” occurs only once, as far as I can tell, in Barbara Kingsolver's haunting new novel, The Poisonwood Bible. When it does, it falls from the mouth of Orleanna Price, a Baptist missionary's wife who uses it to describe not the Belgian Congo, where she, her husband and their four daughters were posted in 1959, but the state of her marriage in those days and the condition of what she calls “the country once known as Orleanna Wharton,” wholly occupied back then by Nathan Price, aforesaid husband and man of God. Joseph Conrad's great novella flickers behind her use of that phrase, and yet it doesn't. Orleanna is not a quoting woman, and for the quoting man in the family, her strident...