SOURCE: “Sweet and Low,” in New Republic, March 22, 1999, pp. 30-37.

In the following review, Siegel criticizes the exploitation of personal suffering in contemporary literature and offers negative evaluation of Kingsolver's fiction, including The Poisonwood Bible. Siegel condemns Kingsolver's popular and uncritically received style of “Nice Writing” as disingenuous and self-righteous.

I.

Barbara Kingsolver is the most successful practitioner of a style in contemporary fiction that might be called Nice Writing. Nice Writing is a violent affability, a deadly sweetness, a fatal gentle touch. But before I start in on Kingsolver's work, I feel I must explain why I feel that I must start in on it.

I do so for a younger version of myself, for the image that I carry inside me of a boy who was the son of a sadistic, alcoholic father, and of a mother who was hurt but also hurtful, and abusive. And...