Recent Reads – June

This month: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

In many ways, a book review is composed of someone else’s work of art: in giving a sketch of my reading, I borrow the author’s achievement and channel her voice with quotations. At this point, I have a stake in her work; I want to see it succeed. The review is my little surprise for a writer whose work I enjoyed, a gift that will hopefully please but might very well end up in a yard sale instead.

But what of the work of art composed as an homage to some great classic? I give you Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper, 2022), which, together with Trust by Hernan Diaz, has just won the Pulitzer Prize.

Kingsolver sets her adaptation of David Copperfield in a collection of trailers in the Appalachians. Young Damon Fields, a redhead of Melungeon descent who will later be known as Demon Copperhead, is born in Lee County, Virginia to a single mother with a history of addiction. The family lives in a property owned by their worthy neighbors, the Peggots, who have their own Little Emily living in Knoxville. Many of the characters correspond faithfully (and amusingly) to the originals; others are recognizable mostly by name. I remember how joyful I was, rereading Charles Dickens after a 40-year hiatus, when the phrase “Barkus is willing” bubbled back up in my mind; in this version, poor Barkus is pretty Miss Barks, a rookie social worker too afraid to enter the foster home where Demon must live while his mother dries out after what might be a suicide attempt. Nevertheless, the new little boy still bites; the long-suffering friend still doodles his skeletons; and the headmaster-turned-farmer still speaks with a whispery voice–though his interpreter must have been left on the cutting-room floor. These correspondences, extended like secret handshakes, gave me a sort of knowing delight.

But there’s an enormous difference in tone. Demon’s mother succumbs to an overdose, leaving her boy at the mercy of an increasingly violent stepfather:

“Everything about the funeral was wrong. First of all being in a church, which I guess is required, but church and Mom were not friends. This went back to her earliest foster home with a preacher that mixed Bible verses with thrashings and worse, his special recipe for punishing bad little girls. Moral of the story, Mom always says she wouldn’t be caught dead in a church. And here she was, losing every battle right to the end, in a white casket from Walmart, the other place she most hated to be.”

This is a truly American voice that owes quite a debt to Huck Finn. Speaking of his old friend Tommy Waddell, Demon says, “I told [him] about the hard and surprising knocks of city life, and he explained it all back to me in book words.”

Even at 500-plus pages, Kingsolver’s adaptation is tightly compressed, so certain key characters inevitably receive short shrift. For example, there simply isn’t enough narrative space for Mr. McCobb to achieve the stature he needs to unveil the full depths of U-Haul’s treachery. But the storyline Kingsolver seems to love most is the one about Dori, the helpless and beautiful girl who first steals Demon’s heart. Dori has dropped out of high school to care for her homebound father and is addicted to painkillers. Soon, Demon, who has blown out a knee on the football field, is right there with her. Demon Copperhead indicts those who strip-mined the region’s coal and then left with the profits, leaving an opioid crisis behind them: too many people are either addicted or caring for relatives whose parents are dead or in prison.

And while the novel is full of good people, what’s notably missing from Kingsolver’s novel is the Christianized culture of nineteenth-century England. As a result, the suffering that can be somewhat bathetic in Dickens becomes truly harrowing in Kingsolver’s hands. Demon’s terrible injury, his long and deep drug addiction, the lines outside the pain clinic, the sexual solicitation Dori experiences when she goes in to seek treatment: in many ways, Kingsolver’s milieu is much worse than the one Dickens faced. And though the women have more freedoms, they are no happier.

Still, Demon Copperhead is beautifully mythical. And as for Miss Barks, who first carries Demon away from home—well, perhaps she’s more like her counterpart than I thought. There’s a nod to old Barkus when Demon remembers admiring June Peggot’s parallel parking in Atlanta: “Men have married women for less reason.”

Note to readers: this book contains explicit scenes, including drug use.