Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver – a review by Paul Whiteing
In the acknowledgement at the end of this impressive page-turner of a novel Kingsolver writes: “I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Coppefield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outage, impressiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.”
Kingsolver transposes David Copperfield to the world of Damon Fields who is nicknamed “copperhead” due the colour of his hair, hence Damen Copperhead, the central character of the book who tells his story of growing up in Appalachia the first person. We start out with Damen living in Lee County Virginia in a trailer with a single, drug addict mother who spends time in rehab at first doing well to get clean only for things to take a bad turn. Demon then spends a number of formative teenage years living in the care system, which if much neglected in the UK, is practically non-existent in the USA. Demon is moved from foster family to foster home and exploited in each case, albeit in differing ways which his caseworkers set out to ignore and indeed Demon learns to not talk about it recognising that the alternatives may be even worse.
Demon has little family or friends but in the McCobbs there is an extended family that offers some help and support. And after absconding from his foster family, Demon eventually finds a grandmother who fosters him to Coach Windfield (and daughter who goes by the name of Angus).
Windfield is the coach of a high school football team which Demon joins and shows much talent for. This is psychologically transformative for Demon who up to now has judged himself as a loser. However, an accident takes hold which becomes compounded by Copperhead self-medicating some pain relief through opioids which turns quickly to an addiction. Here Kingsolver excels in taking us into a world of cheap and easily accessible opioids and the destructive impact they have on young (and so not so young) people across the rural communities of the USA. The opioid crisis in the USA is well known and documented, but Kingsolver shows its brutal impact and destructive power through the human impact and misery that it sows. Whilst entirely fictionalised, Kingsolver is brilliant identifying the bigger picture of the injustice that drug addiction causes and how “the system” is designed to support easy availability combined with limited public finding for recovering users so that everyone feels trapped.
This book, in telling us the story of Demon Copperhead, goes much further and the canvas Kingsolver is working on is much larger and hence the parallels with David Copperfield and the social injustice that Dickens was also pointing to, being re-created here.
This is a truly excellent novel. By the end I finished the last chapter, I felt a close affinity to Copperhead and was sad to read close the book as I want so much to know what happens in the next chapters of his life.
Demon Copperhead - some additional comments
There’s no need for me to do a full review of this book because my brother in law, Paul, has produced an excellent review which is already on the blog. In fact, the reason I decided to read this prize-winning book by this accomplished novelist was because of Paul’s review – and I am delighted that I did so.
This is one of the best of those recently written novels that I have read over the last year. Despite being located in the lives of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised white inhabitants of Lee County, Virginia, who are hooked on prescription drugs, it was not the worthy but depressing read I expected. It was so much more than that.
Without treading on Paul’s review, I’ll just remind you of its key components. Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead because of his red hair, is our narrator. As Kingsolver explains, she has created a modern version of David Copperfield. Like David, Damon has had a tough start living with a drug addicted mother in a trailer. She tries hard to break her addiction for Damon’s sake but gets entangled with a controlling man and her life begins to unravel once again. This starts Damon on a downward spiral as he eventually gets lost in America’s terrible social services system. Whilst he has a moment of false hope as a high school football star, Damon expects to fail and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He masks his pain at the seemingly inevitable dysfunction of his life with the readily available prescription drugs that America uses to pacify the messy parts of its society.
The reason that the book is more than just a misery fest is that Damon, for all his sense of hopelessness about himself and the lack of opportunities for him and all those he loves, never stops trying to do the right thing and behave with loyalty and kindness. His voice and the book itself is generous in presenting the decent core within most of its characters even when their lives are falling apart and they behave in a self-destructive way. Like Dickens, Kingsolver doesn’t blame Damon and his friends for the messiness of their lives but instead she focuses on the way those in power who have created the systems and circumstances that blight so many lives.
Some readers have expressed criticisms of the book’s extended middle section when Damon and his girlfriend are trapped in a domestic drug hell. I don’t agree, and would say that the humanity on display, intermingled with the waste of so much potential, give this story dramatic power. There’s a stirring if tragic final set piece and shards of hope at the end. As I say, I loved this book and was swept along when I read it. Incidentally, it also received a very positive response from everyone in my book group.