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It's certainly the case that you can find lots of passages in Prodigal Summer that sound as though they could have come straight out of The Omnivore's Dilemma: from "I don't love animals as individuals...I love them as a whole species...they should have the right to persist in their own ways" (177) to "specializing makes life more risky. If their food dies, they die" (348-9). So one way to read the novel would be as a re-interpretation of the story of what is "normal," what is "right" in farming; it describes what might happen if we make different choices than we have in the past.

But this assumes that a novel makes an argument...does/can it? Or is a fictional text a different "kettle of fish" from the sort of non-fictional prose project Pollan's taken on? (I use this passage to kick off another of my courses, in Critical Feminist Studies: “…literature is...the place where impasses can be kept and opened for examination, questions can be guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms. Literature…is…the work of giving-to-read those impossible contradictions that cannot yet be spoken." Barbara Johnson: The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender, 1998).