Advice to anybody with the plan of naming your kid Junior: going through life as mini-you will be as thrilling as finding dried-up jizz on the carpet. But having a famous Ghost Dad puts a different light on it, and I can’t say I hated being noticed in that way. Around the same time Maggot started his shoplifting experiments, I was starting to get known as Demon Copperhead. You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it.
I see plenty of reviewers saying, “I loved The Poisonwood Bible when I read it twenty years ago, haven’t really liked anything by Barbara Kingsolver since, but since Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize I thought I’d give it a chance…”, and that was exactly my experience. From there, other reviewers are either delighted or disappointed by this novel, and I have to say: I’m leaning more towards disappointment. This does start out strong: I was enchanted by young Damon/Demon (apparently everyone in Appalachian Tennessee gets a crazy nickname), and you’d have to have a heart of coal to not be moved by the story of a young orphan as he’s bounced around an uncaring fostercare system, but as he grows older I was less moved; Demon tells us what’s happening without showing us what it’s like; it’s all grief with zero grit. Kingsolver also surrounds Demon with several sermonising/moralising characters — characters who make sure the reader draws a line between what’s happening on the ground in Lee County and the forces (political, Big Pharma, sociological) at play behind the scenes — and frankly, that felt a little condescending; I can make those connections myself. Also: Demon mentions several times that he’s “Melungeon” (Appalachian mixed race; a term historically considered a slur), and although that term is never defined for us in the book, we know that he has darker-than-white skin, green eyes, and coppery hair — and although I did feel slightly uncomfortable for this older white woman to be writing from this perspective, race never once enters into the story; it seems like a strange and unnecessary choice. Kingsolver does have a way with turning a phrase — I admired many, many sentences — and if you can concentrate on just the plot, there is a lot of heart-tugging drama to carry a reader through this long book, but I was not blown away by the overall effort. Middling three stars, and I doubt I’ll read Kingsolver again.
What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.
It’s no spoiler to note that Kingsolver wrote this as a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, and there are certainly important correlations that can be made between the uncaring state in Victorian England and “institutional poverty and its damages to children” in modern day southern Appalachia. (You may or may not like the irony of Demon commenting on reading Dickens in school, “seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.” And although I haven’t read Copperfield it did delight me when I realised that the character of U-Haul Pyles must correspond to the notorious Uriah Heep; I am sure that there are countless such correspondences that I did not recognise.) And as Kingsolver is from Appalachia herself, it makes perfect sense that she would set her novel at the dawn of the “shiny new” pain reliever, OxyContin, that seemed tailor-made for the local labouring population. As one of the secondary sermonising characters had taught Demon:
What the companies did, he told us, was put the shutthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once, we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.
As for Demon’s story: his father died before he was born and his mom ODs when he’s ten, sending him into a variety of foster homes (awful, middling, and ideal), until a football injury sidelines his progress and, apparently, his whole future. There is misery piled upon misery — good and bad people, but no one ever really looking out for the orphan in their midst (which I reckon must be how Dickens told it?) — but even when some truly horrific events happen, Kingsolver pulls back from really letting us experience them: we don’t see the tragedies, we just hear Demon’s reporting on them. I’ll put a further quibble behind a spoiler warning: I haven’t read David Copperfield but I have read Great Expectations, so when it says that Demon’s mom’s social security would be going into trust for him — and that his grandmother would look into setting up a trust for his dad’s, too — and that Demon was looking forward to getting revenge on Stoner some day, I was sure that Stoner would come out of the woodwork as Demon turned 18 to try and steal his money and that Demon would either replay the scene of helplessness with the strung out prostitute who stole his money as a kid, or finally get some redemption for that by thwarting Stoner (and hopefully get more revenge on him than that). But neither the money or Stoner comes up again. Which is not only disappointing, but weird. I do think that this retelling was clever and important in concept, but as a literary experience, I didn’t feel like Kingsolver pulled it off. Not my cup of tea. Countless good passages, though:
Live long enough, and all the things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
