Why do we read novels? To be entertained and distracted, for sure, but also to learn about lives other than our own. And not just to learn: to understand, as fully as we can, what it would feel like to be another person in a place we’ve never lived, in the past, on another planet. It’s a kind of miracle we’ve come to take for granted.
When it is said that a work of non-fiction reads “like a novel”, the element of praise – for its gripping storytelling or larger-than-life subject – masks a kind of disparagement: it implies some suspicion of the form, as if the fantastical or false inheres in the novel when in fact the opposite is the case. Novels, certainly the greatest novels, are wholly true because nothing exists outside their frame.
In the decades since Barbara Kingsolver published Holding the Line (1989), her compelling account of what became known as the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, she has become one of the greatest novelists writing in English. Most recently her 2022 novel Demon Copperhead, an Appalachian reworking of David Copperfield, won both the Pulitzer Prize in the US and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK – she is the only author to have won the latter twice. In November she is to be awarded the National Book Foundation’s 2024 Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters, and her books, including The Poisonwood Bible (1998) and The Lacuna (2009), are beloved by readers around the world.
If you want to understand why readers have so taken her to their hearts, and why her work is so significant, Holding the Line, now published for the first time in the UK, offers a fascinating key. In a new introduction to the book, Kingsolver describes her writing life this way: “I’ve tried to keep my ear trained on the part of the story most of us don’t know yet. Almost always, I wind up in the relatively uncharted terrain of working-class women’s experience.”
And this account of a strike that was part of the global dismantling of organised labour in the 1980s is very much a women’s story. In the summer of 1983, unions had been working for weeks to reach a settlement with five copper-producing companies in Arizona. All but one settled. Phelps Dodge held out, asking workers to accept cuts in wages, holiday allowance and cost-of-living protection. The workers refused, and at midnight on 1 July, Phelps Dodge employees walked off the job. The strike would go on for more than a year. At the time, Kingsolver was a journalist living in Tucson; she intended to cover the story but not, at first, to write a book.
Events overtook her. “Helicopters and squads of armoured men with tear gas and automatic weapons were storming bucolic Main Streets in very small towns, and strike supporters were claiming their right to hold the line with extraordinary resistance. The faces and hands of that resistance mostly belonged to women. As far as I was concerned, this was not just interesting. It also looked terrifying, and it looked like history.”
The best stories are carried along by a cast of remarkable characters. She calls the book a “community journal”, and it has that aspect, as the women she meets speak in real time about their experiences and their lives. Do not imagine that Kingsolver is encountering only the wives and sisters of men who worked in the mines: many of these women are miners themselves who had already fought to be permitted to do what was – or should have been – well-paid, skilled work. “In every season since the Earth’s face was opened for dredging,” Kingsolver writes, “women have worked in mines and they have fought for the safety and survival of miners.”
We meet women like Baby Doll Schwartz, the seventh of nine children, one of the first women hired at the Morenci pit in 1975 and undaunted by the challenges of this male-dominated world. “I’d say, ‘How do you know I can’t do it? I don’t know that I can’t do it.’” There is fearless Flossie Navarro, who tells Kingsolver that, “I don’t really have no understanding of the women’s moment because I’ve always drawed the same pay as a man.”
It’s no spoiler to say that the union didn’t win its fight against Phelps Dodge. Though the strike did not officially end until early 1986, the trade unions representing the mine workers were eventually decertified – new workers, brought in during the strike voted for it – and that was effectively the end of organised labour in Arizona. In this same era Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air-traffic controllers who had the temerity to go on strike – and banned them from federal service for life. The upheaval and destruction of the miners’ strike in Britain is only briefly mentioned (“A letter from the auxiliary of the National Union of Mineworkers in England – then engaged in a coal strike – informed them that women were instrumental in holding that strike together too”) but this is a book telling a specific story, not one about the broader labour movement around the world.
Kingsolver has no truck with non-fiction’s claim to objectivity. Supposedly this is what differentiates it from novels, but this, she says, is bunk. “In theory, all the good journalists should come away from one event with essentially the same story,” she writes. In truth, there is bias everywhere. “Most [journalists] were on the payroll of newspapers that fed the law-and-order appetites of an urban, white-collar readership. And what do you know, they called in the news that these strikers were violent anarchists.” What we find in Kingsolver’s book, however, is not anarchy but organisation and resolve: at its end she shows how many of the strikers used what the dispute had taught them to build successful public lives.
In Holding the Line readers will discover what made Kingsolver the novelist she is now. They will meet resilient women in the significant, transformative moments of their lives. The strikers lost their battle; but these women discovered new possibilities for themselves.
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike
Barbara Kingsolver
Faber & Faber, 290pp, £16.99
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[See also: Alan Hollinghurst’s intimate vision]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break