inverarity (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
inverarity) wrote2025-01-19 11:47 am
inverarity) wrote2025-01-19 11:47 am
Book Review: Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
A modern rewrite of David Copperfield, set in Appalachia.
Harper, 2022, 560 pages
It takes some big cajones to rewrite Dickens, and Barbara Kingsolver pleasantly surprised me by not just doing a creditable job, but also writing a male protagonist in a coming-of-age story who was believably male. There are a lot of complaints in the book world about men writing women badly, but one of my pet peeves is the less-acknowledged problem of women who think they can write about what male sexuality feels like. So I was skeptical of a female author known for litfic doing a boy's bildungsroman, but she seemed to get it.
"Demon Copperhead" is the nickname young Damon Fields is tagged with as a young lad born to a teenage mother in Lee County, Virginia in the 1990s. Demon Copperhead is yet another example of two phenomena I think more readers, especially those who mostly confine themselves to select genres, would be aware of if they read more widely: first, that a lot of books are basically fanfiction, but if you do it to Dickens instead of Rowling, it's literature. And second, that if you read widely, you will better appreciate every book you read, even in your favorite genres.
I am a big Dickens fan and David Copperfield, his sentimental, semi-autobiographical tale of young David's hard-life upbringing, is one of my favorites. I don't think you need to have read David Copperfield to appreciate this story of Appalachian poverty and drug addiction, but you will miss so much, as every character in the book is essentially a transposed Dickens character and the nods throughout the book are like little easter eggs for Dickens fans.
"Demon" (as he is known to everyone) starts out life like his Victorian counterpart, born with a caul over his head to a loving but weak-willed single mother who brings an abusive stepfather into his life, and everything is just downhill from there. Demon's mother is a junkie, he's sent into foster care, which is its own kind of shitshow, and when he hits early puberty and has all the makings of football stardom, he blows out a knee and gets addicted to oxy. He hooks up with a manic pixie dreamgirl who's more of a nightmare, because it turns out being a manic pixie is a lot less cute when she's a heroin addict.
Dickens novel was an indictment of the brutal Victorian class system, in which the lot of the poor was the poorhouse, there was no such thing as CPS, and David escaped the almost inescapable gravity of poverty only by great good fortune and some natural talents.
Kingsolver takes aim at the poverty traps of 20th century America, and especially at the devastation that opiates wreaked upon her native Appalachians in the 90s. (She also has quite an axe to grind about "hillbilly" stereotypes and all the ways her people are insulted in popular media; Demon goes on multiple riffs about this.) Where Dickens presented a grim but ultimately heartwarming tale, Kingsolver's tale is mostly grim with only occasional bright spots and flashes of humor. While Demon will frustrate you throughout the book with his endless series of bad, short-sighted decisions, each one is understandable from his point of view. As he explains in his first person narrative, why should he value school or expect that it will lead to anything better? Why should he think about the world outside Lee County when literally no one else in his life does? How is he supposed to have a vision for the future or a plan for his life or dreams of some mythical thing called a "career" when he has literally zero role models presenting such to him? Eventually he does get a few better examples of adulthood trying to intervene in his life, but by then the damage is almost irrevocable. Almost.
While, like David, Demon does eventually get a happy ending, Demon Copperhead is a very dark book and can be quite a downer. The misery just seems to go on and on. Every time it seems that Demon is on the verge of having something good happen in his life, it turns sour. The darkness, however, is understandable as Kingsolver's most scathing condemnation is for Purdue and all the doctors who helped turn Appalachia into an opiate-addicted wasteland.
This was a modern bildungsroman that will elicit your sympathy with a likeable protagonist despite all his dumb moves, but I do recommend reading David Copperfield too.
My complete list of book reviews.
Harper, 2022, 560 pages
"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.
It takes some big cajones to rewrite Dickens, and Barbara Kingsolver pleasantly surprised me by not just doing a creditable job, but also writing a male protagonist in a coming-of-age story who was believably male. There are a lot of complaints in the book world about men writing women badly, but one of my pet peeves is the less-acknowledged problem of women who think they can write about what male sexuality feels like. So I was skeptical of a female author known for litfic doing a boy's bildungsroman, but she seemed to get it.
"Demon Copperhead" is the nickname young Damon Fields is tagged with as a young lad born to a teenage mother in Lee County, Virginia in the 1990s. Demon Copperhead is yet another example of two phenomena I think more readers, especially those who mostly confine themselves to select genres, would be aware of if they read more widely: first, that a lot of books are basically fanfiction, but if you do it to Dickens instead of Rowling, it's literature. And second, that if you read widely, you will better appreciate every book you read, even in your favorite genres.
I am a big Dickens fan and David Copperfield, his sentimental, semi-autobiographical tale of young David's hard-life upbringing, is one of my favorites. I don't think you need to have read David Copperfield to appreciate this story of Appalachian poverty and drug addiction, but you will miss so much, as every character in the book is essentially a transposed Dickens character and the nods throughout the book are like little easter eggs for Dickens fans.
"Demon" (as he is known to everyone) starts out life like his Victorian counterpart, born with a caul over his head to a loving but weak-willed single mother who brings an abusive stepfather into his life, and everything is just downhill from there. Demon's mother is a junkie, he's sent into foster care, which is its own kind of shitshow, and when he hits early puberty and has all the makings of football stardom, he blows out a knee and gets addicted to oxy. He hooks up with a manic pixie dreamgirl who's more of a nightmare, because it turns out being a manic pixie is a lot less cute when she's a heroin addict.
Dickens novel was an indictment of the brutal Victorian class system, in which the lot of the poor was the poorhouse, there was no such thing as CPS, and David escaped the almost inescapable gravity of poverty only by great good fortune and some natural talents.
Kingsolver takes aim at the poverty traps of 20th century America, and especially at the devastation that opiates wreaked upon her native Appalachians in the 90s. (She also has quite an axe to grind about "hillbilly" stereotypes and all the ways her people are insulted in popular media; Demon goes on multiple riffs about this.) Where Dickens presented a grim but ultimately heartwarming tale, Kingsolver's tale is mostly grim with only occasional bright spots and flashes of humor. While Demon will frustrate you throughout the book with his endless series of bad, short-sighted decisions, each one is understandable from his point of view. As he explains in his first person narrative, why should he value school or expect that it will lead to anything better? Why should he think about the world outside Lee County when literally no one else in his life does? How is he supposed to have a vision for the future or a plan for his life or dreams of some mythical thing called a "career" when he has literally zero role models presenting such to him? Eventually he does get a few better examples of adulthood trying to intervene in his life, but by then the damage is almost irrevocable. Almost.
While, like David, Demon does eventually get a happy ending, Demon Copperhead is a very dark book and can be quite a downer. The misery just seems to go on and on. Every time it seems that Demon is on the verge of having something good happen in his life, it turns sour. The darkness, however, is understandable as Kingsolver's most scathing condemnation is for Purdue and all the doctors who helped turn Appalachia into an opiate-addicted wasteland.
This was a modern bildungsroman that will elicit your sympathy with a likeable protagonist despite all his dumb moves, but I do recommend reading David Copperfield too.
My complete list of book reviews.