Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper, 2022).
I got a shock a couple of pages into Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead: I realized I liked it.
I hadn't expected to. I figured I ought to read and review it because it was a takeoff on David Copperfield, written by an acclaimed novelist, and was turning out to be pretty popular. (It would even go on to win the Pulitzer, though I didn't know that at the time!) But I was leery. I knew the book was set in the modern world, and I've suffered through any number of poorly updated classics. Besides which, the setting -- the recent opioid epidemic -- promised to make this one especially gritty.
Well, Demon Copperhead is gritty, all right. But it's also enthralling, thanks in large part to the voice of its narrator and hero. Damon Fields -- nicknamed "Demon Copperhead" at an early age -- tells us his story with relentless frankness, both the worst parts of it and the rare moments of happiness. There's a lively wit as well as an earthiness in his recounting. He shows a weary acceptance of the way things are, and yet also, rooted deeply in him, a tendency "to wish for more than I can have."
"A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing," he muses, looking back on his early childhood. "If you get past that and grown, it's easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you've ended up someplace you're proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy."
Demon's life in its own way is just as difficult as David Copperfield's -- but unlike David's, his difficulties almost never ease up. Born in Lee County, Virginia, to a drug-addicted teenage mother, Demon shows an early creativity that life in a poverty-stricken Appalachian community does its best to hammer out of him.
Up to a point, his life follows the broad outline of David's: fleeing an abusive stepfather after his mother's death, he seeks out his aunt and finally has a chance at a decent life. But then there's a deviation: Demon shows promise as a high school football player, only to crash and burn after a devastating knee injury. And waiting in the wings are a pill-peddling doctor and a pretty girl named Dori who has access to her father's fentanyl supply ...
As this trajectory shows, Kingsolver both pays affectionate homage to her source material and strikes out on her own path. (Note: The Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition, which I read, starts with an essay about how Dickens inspired her.) She clearly knows Dickens's plot and characters well -- well enough to experiment with them, sometimes faithfully transliterating them to her own pages and sometimes pulling them apart, or combining them, or spinning them off in various directions. It's not hard to figure out who, say, Betsy Woodall is, or Coach Winfield, or Mr. and Mrs. McCobb. But there were fun moments of suddenly realizing who Miss Barks the social worker is based on, or guessing who was Ham Peggotty only to find out it was somebody else.
In the bigger picture as well as in the smallest character details, Kingsolver expertly balances the influence of Dickens with the demands of the story she wants to tell. Demon falls down a far deeper hole than David ever does. But as with David, though he's been let down and betrayed, he also has loving and loyal people in his life to help him find his way.
The language is rough -- sometimes very rough -- and there's the occasional explicit sexual or violent description, so be aware of that going in. But if you do give it a try, you might find yourself as caught up in Demon's story as I was, and touched by the fact that, in the midst of all the seediness and the pain, the story is suffused with a kind of hope that can only be described as Dickensian.
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