"After Eden" by Valerie Miner

Valerie Miner's "After Eden" is both a personal, individual story and a collective one potentially engaged with provocative political questions.

Two groups serve as foci in the book. There are the members of a lesbian land collective in California's McKenzie Valley, Beulah Ranch. It is home to a diverse collection of lesbian couples: Jewish, earth-mother Ruth and her eleven year old daughter Joyce; spunky, Chinese-American, small-scale vintner Lindsey and her older, African-American, graduate student girlfriend Marianne; Biology teacher, salt-of-the-earth Virginia and her working class, UPS truck-driving lover, Sally; and, urban-planner Emily and her lover, Salerno, a jazz saxophonist. These women are the founders and land owners. Beulah also provides community/family to a number of additional characters, as equally diverse as those just listed, who share in the community's activities but don't own land on the ranch..

The fictional McKenzie Valley, situated in the mountains Northeast of San Francisco, serves as a second, broader focus. It is a much less formal and organized 'collective' than Beulah Ranch. As sketched by Miner, various groups have called this fictional valley home, interacting and badacting with each other: Russians, Spaniards, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, Anglos, vintners, farmers, yuppies, migrant workers, and loggers. Again, another diverse lot. The book is kind of grasping when it comes to diversity in a Noah's ark kind of way. Yet, while the diversity is a little much, the various communities and families in the novel present a host of good questions: what makes a place home; what gives you a right to call a place home; how do we learn to share a place so that it is home to many.

Miner anchors these panoramic, group perspectives with a more traditional, narrative of death and loss. The novel begins with the urban-planner and urban-minded Emily Adams driving from Chicago to spend the summer with her lover, Salerno, at their cabin on Beulah Ranch. Emily arrives a bit before Salerno to Beulah, a place Salerno's has slowly sold Emily on as place of renewal, a place "of unleashrd vitality"(10). Salerno "saw the land as a new home and the women there as a kind of family"(16).

Emily would seem to be of this family and yet apart. While she's friends with the Beulah women, her primary connection is to Salerno, and deep down, right until the very end of the book, she lives apart, in her head. She questions "'Who are friends?'...could you b friends only with the members of your own tribe?...What if you didn't have a tribe?"(99). At the outset, it would seem that Emily's 'tribe' consists of Salerno alone. Arriving at Beulah, Emily's first impulse is to hideaway and wait for Salerno before opening out to the world. Unfortunately, Salerno never comes.

Tragedy strikes when Salerno's plane crashes. Salerno was Emily's entree into the Beulah family and the Valley. Introverted, intellectual, it was Salerno who brought Emily out of herself and introduced her to these worlds. Without her, Emily is inclined to leave Beulah, to flee a place now irrevocably marked by loss. Despite her own impulses and instincts, Beulah and the family it fostered acts like a home, claiming her. When she first returns at the outset of the novel, she inadvertently, half-consciously refers to it as home in the course of conversing with Phoenix, her dog, and she wonders whether the term applies. Emily spends twelve months trying to leave; Beulah Ranch, land and family,calls her back.

Of course, what calls her back may seem circumstance: Ruth's accident keeps her awhile; Lindsey's pregnancy keeps her; a newcomer to the community draws her attention; her San Francisco based brother, distant heretofore, begins to try to connect to her while she remains in the McKenzie Valley; she commits to teaching migrant workers. However, all of these circumstances are related to the fact that Emily has become a part of something. She's entered into a community and found a home. Ok, maybe she's found herself in a home. Regardless, home is what keeps her from following her grief fueled impulse to leave. Home asserts its claims on her being.

This is a political novel of ideas. It has its flaws. Characters are a bit flat, most especially a two-dimensional fundamentalist Christian who proves to be the villain. Or, in this case, ends up "temporarily in a prison for the criminally insane"(244) which seems a weak way to damn opponents you can't bring to life.

Ultimately, as a political novel, I think it fails most particularly on one front. Miner presents the Mackenzie Valley is a diverse collection of peoples whose interaction is marked by conflict. Beulah seems to serve as a relatively peaceable kingdom offered in response. Yet, I'm not certain that Beulah presents a future for communities.

Beulah and the MacKenzie differ in profound ways. Beulah is diverse in some ways. The residents have various ethnic, racial and age differences. However, in the end, they all pretty much think alike. Moreover, Beulah is a community by choice while the Mackenzie is a community of circumstance, a far more common variety of community. Community by choice may seem benign and to be desired. Yet, communities by choice often need to be maintained by harsh methods of exclusion. When Sally begins to act in a manner harmful to the ranch, she is let go. Good for the health of the ranch. Bad for the health of Sally. Perhaps this is what Communities need to do to maintain their peace, but this is hardly a picture of community as a caring family, despite the fact that Miner often applies the family tag to Beulah.