REVIEW: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
A retelling of Dickens' David Copperfield set in turn of the 21st century Appalachia
Executive Summary: As the subtitle confesses, this is a retelling of David Copperfield set in western Virginia in the 90s and early 2000s. Damon Fields, called Demon Copperhead by everyone who knows him, comes of age in the midst of American institutionalized poverty. Foster care, opioid addiction, hunger.
Star Rating: Five stars. This won the Pulitzer in 2023. It deserves it. I’ve not read David Copperfield myself. I want to! (I will!) Therefore, I cannot speak to the method of storytelling being inventive or merely updated for the book’s context. However, I can speak to Kingsolver’s skill at sucking me into the narrative. I was frequently made to pause and read a sentence aloud for the beauty and wisdom it contained. I have over 55 different highlights throughout this Kindle copy I borrowed from the library that are pieces of poetry found amidst the prose. This story is tragic and triumphant and true.
Content Rating: This one is a hard R, perhaps a TV-MA. Demon pulls no punches at any point in the narrative. Every crass word to describe female sexual anatomy is used both within the context of sex and without. Every cuss word known to man is thrown around. There is frank discussion of drug use, abuse, and overdose. There is child abuse, neglect. There is starvation, often intentionally committed against children. There are allusions to sexual violence. There is homophobia. There is racism. There are pro-God and anti-church themes throughout. It is a hard read! Definitely not for children. Definitely not meant to be an audiobook played on speaker around kids.
Review Sans Spoilers: This section will only discuss the book without spoiling any major plot points. I will say, that it follows closely the story beats of David Copperfield, so if you’re a Dickens fan, you’ve probably been spoiled already. The spoilers from me, however, will occur after the “Subscribe” button.
Damon Fields, a.k.a. “Demon Copperhead.” I have not yearned for a protagonist to know peace, comfort, and family so earnestly as I did while reading this book. He is born inside the trailer that his teen mother rents out from the neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Peggotty. His mom spends time in AA and rehab, depending on the season in their lives. She was raised in DSS (foster care, colloquially) and Demon is introduced to their care from a young age.
This tome is an anthem for the resiliency of children and the tenacity of those burdened - through the accident of their birth - with institutional poverty. Demon, as an only child to a mother in recovery for alcohol and narcotic abuse, is familiarly acquainted with The Twelve Steps and the procedure for children when they are removed from their homes.
“I wonder if DSS had anything like Step 9, where you eventually have to apologize to all the kids you’ve screwed over.”
Again, working with abused and neglected children through Dallas CASA has provided important context for me while reading this book. Many will not be able to finish reading this book because the steady drumbeat of trauma gets too difficult to endure at many points in time.
However, I think, that was Dickens’ (and now Kingsolver’s) thesis.
Look at how far Dickens went! He became a prolific writer. Perhaps a little wordy for my taste, but also, God Almighty, does Charles Dickens know what it means to suffer. Dickens was shunted from school at twelve to endure harsh labor in a boot-blacking factory. In short, Dickens is David Copperfield.
Kingsolver’s adaptation expertly examines the question: what if Charles Dickens was born in a western Virginian backwater at the beginning of the opioid epidemic? What does it mean for a boy to be born into a broken family, witness it break further, and be left, at eleven, to put together the pieces without knowledge or the support required to do so?
Throughout, the theme of belonging is given prime of place. Demon is desperate to belong - to his father, to the Peggots, to the older boy within his first foster home, to his first girlfriend, to the relief of oxy following a catastrophic knee injury.
I think many people’s main critique with this book will be that it is “trauma porn.” (If you want that, read Island of the World by Michael D. O’Brien, geez.) I think, however, those critiques, while legitimate and perhaps well-placed, are misunderstanding the essence of the genre: Bildungsroman.1
Ah. Rarely do I get to flex my German skills. (Not that impressive, frankly, in the age of the Internet. Alas, this is my blog and so flaunt I shall!) In German, nouns are often combined and strung together until they reach unwieldy, Frankenstein’s monster-esque lengths. Bildungs = educational; Roman = novel. These novels follow the protagonist from youth to adulthood and focus on the education they receive from their nascence onward.
Demon’s life is traumatized. Yet, he does not spill ink dwelling on the events that traumatized him. There’s not time for it when your next meal is uncertain and you’re dead tired from an arduous day of manual labor and school. Most of this doorstopper of a novel focuses on how those traumatic events shape his character.
“People find more ways to shut up their monsters than a Bible has verses.”
Yet, understandably, this was a difficult read. I won’t discuss the bits that wrenched me above the subscribe button but I was moved frequently to an upset stomach while reading.
I have read many different books that deal with the opoid crisis, specifically within Appalachia.2 The tragedy of these books is that their narratives are not fictional. That is why my stomach was turned so much while reading. Demon is not afforded the opportunity to simply be a child. From the youngest of ages, he remembers helping his mother pursue sobriety so that she can make enough money to support them both.
He comes of age in a world so full of pain that there’s an almost animalistic compulsion towards pleasure of any kind. There can be no moderation when tomorrow is uncertain. Couple that with the bleak chemistry of addiction - that it takes less than a week to develop opioid dependence - well, no wonder Demon struggles with addiction as he grows.
Anyways, this is a beautiful book with a beautiful boy trying to find his place in the world. I will leave you with one final quote, before the spoilers - and Mack Rage Fest - begin.
“If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help. People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don’t: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless. The pain of an exploded leg. This tether that’s meant to attach you to something all your life, be it home or parents or safety, has been flailing around unfastened all this time, tearing your brain’s roots, whipping around so hard it might take out an eye. All at once, that tether goes still on the floor, and you’re at rest. You start out trying to get back there, and pretty soon you’re just trying to get out of bed. It becomes your job, staving off the dopesickness for another day. Then it becomes your God. Nobody ever wanted to join that church.”
Damn. Makes me want to buy my own copy of the book. Just gotta wait for paperback.
Review With Spoilers: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!
Okay. Deep breaths. The three-prong analysis that began to develop through my reading of this book was this:
Institutionalized poverty should have been solved by now.
I believe in a corporeal hell simply because pharmaceutical company executives need somewhere to spend eternity.3
Hypocritical Christianity and purity culture are direct contributors to both childhood poverty and addiction.
Spicy! The hottest of takes! I won’t spend any time fleshing out my thoughts on (1) and (2). (3), however, interests me.
Okay. For real, spoilers commencing now. . .
The Depiction of Poverty and Christian Charity in Demon Copperhead
Demon’s mother OD’s on oxy while he is in foster care after defending himself against his stepfather’s physical abuse. And at her funeral, what Demon remembers hearing the most is the town’s “Christians” whispering conspiratorially about how, simply, Demon’s mother deserved what she got.
Demon is enraged to the point of numbness at the whispering of hatred from people that refused to help his mother when she was alone and struggling. The only “Christian” concern they gave her was that of their gossip and calumny.
I mean, c’mon. These Christian folks gave a child the nickname “Demon.” A real moniker to grow into. But this is not even where the critique on hypocrisy begins.
After Demon’s stepfather lies to DSS about the circumstances surround Demon’s self-defense outburst, Demon is sent to stay on a farm where the farm owner, Creaky, allows the boys to live in outright squalor so that he can pull a $500/kid/month check from DSS. What is this money meant to be used for? The children’s food, clothing, and medical expenses. What does Creaky use the money for? To pay the property taxes on his farm.
The kicker? Creaky also enlists the boys to help harvest his tobacco crop - pulling them out of months of school to do so. If the eleven year old children fail to harvest the crop appropriately? They are “leathered” and Creaky complains to them about how “he’s just trying to do the Christian thing and then the state sends him idiots to help care for the farm.”
. . .
. . .
. . .
A thousand “no”s. This moment lit me up, stirring such passion about becoming an attorney. I will be all up in the business of foster parents. I have never been so froth-at-the-mouth mad at a fictional character. (I realize I speak in superlatives more than is probably true or healthy, yet here we are.) They are children - not paychecks.
Yet, this is precisely how the machine of poverty churns. Creaky came of age in a pro-tobacco America, when cigarettes were advertised on television and the government provided subsidies for the tobacco grown on farmland. Soon, the tides turned on tobacco, and the subsidies and demand for the crop dried up.
It explains the desperation for a paycheck. It does not excuse it.
Now, the book is 550 pages long. I won’t belabor the various depictions of hypocritical Christianity. However, I will end my analysis and review of this book with a discussion of how the fixation on purity, most often in the context of Christianity, creates a self-realizing problem with the human relationship to pleasure, re: addiction.
The Depiction of Addiction in Demon Copperhead
The book follows Demon from boyhood through adolescence into the very early moments of adulthood. He is barely 21 by the end of the novel, if that.
I mention this because Demon, for most of the narrative, is a teenager obsessed with two things: girls and football. His DSS caseworker? A babe. The girls at school? Babes. The eighteen year old girl that calls him to have phone sex? An angel sent from Heaven above - the babest of babes.
From the beginning of his consciousness, Demon learns that pleasure is shameful - something to be hidden and mopped up, something that ultimately ends in pain and suffering. The scorn of the town following his mother’s overdose solidifies this.
“In the long run, that’s how I’ve come to picture Mom at the end: reaching as hard as her little body would stretch, trying to touch the blue sky, reaching for some peace.”
From then on, Demon hides everything that brings belonging, comfort, and, yes, pleasure. He draws comics but no one really knows about it until he feels safe enough to share. Then, boys being gross, he begins to be commissioned to draw pictures inspired by the Playboys given to him. Eventually, the fixation becomes more material as Demon grows and becomes a football prodigy at the local high school and the girls become obsessed, in turn, with him.
While it would be really easy to reduce this sexualized existence to hormones, etc. I think it is more telling of how desperate Demon is to belong, and to experience the self-actualizing pleasure of being known and chosen. Here’s a smattering of quotes from the novel of Demon’s thoughts around football, girls, and belonging:
“Learning the plays by heart and then making them on the field, there are no words to describe. It’s an act of magic to take an idea and turn it into bodies on bodies, a full-participation thing for all to see. Like what’s said about the Bible, the word made flesh.”
“We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.”
“I spotted her across the room talking with her hands the way she did, always in motion, pointing at me to show everybody I was the one she belonged to. If you want to discuss having Jesus up in your veins. For me, that was it.”
It’s specifically the last quote that I want to draw your attention to. Demon, at that point in the novel, is watching his girlfriend, Dori, at Mr. Peg’s funeral. Dori and Demon fall into wild, passionate love. That reckless kind of teenagehood love that frightens concerned parents.
Yet, Demon learns to hide his pleasure, the deep sense of belonging, from everyone. He meets Dori while she is caring for her ailing father. Demon remarks that her eyes were like “two dark pools” that he just fell into.
Dori’s pupils were blown from the oxy when she first meets Demon.
The boy has no idea the whirlwind he is in for. The whirlwind that he must embrace alone. And, at that point in time, he does not care. Dori is his first in every way. She is the first woman to choose him publicly, to claim him as her own. She is his first “all the way” girl. She is the first one to share narcotics with him for the sole purpose of “having Jesus in your veins.”
All the while, Demon is simply in love with her. Her pointing at him at a funeral gives him the same high as narcotics. If that’s not absurdly resonant with my experience of teenage boys.
Yet, because of the scorn, ridicule, and judgment from the “Christian” folks surrounding Demon at crucial, formative moments of his life, he falls into this rabbit hole alone. Deeper and deeper the spiral twists. He moves out of his stable and loving foster home to live alone with Dori. They scrounge for food and drugs. They chase the high of each other and supplement it with pills when they are no longer sufficient.
“For Dori and me, all our best people died on us early, before we had any good shot at sin. So we had catching up to do. Maybe that’s why nothing we ever did felt wrong.”
Eventually, though, the addiction becomes too much. Particularly for Dori.
“At some point you’ll look at this person that’s your whole world and offer to go get something, the little hit that so easily brings her back. You do it as an act of love. I’ve known no greater.”
Why wouldn’t Demon go get help? An adult that could provide care and concern for them as they struggle out of their addictions?
Because all the “Christians” have taught him is that pleasure is wrong and that help is not coming.
He dug this hole, right? So he needs to climb out of it, right?
Sigh. As I said at the top, this story is tragic and triumphant and true. I realize the knot of opioid addiction is complex and nuanced. There are many different actors, influences, and proposed solutions. But where poverty and pain collide with the hypocrisy of religion, therein lies the trappings of addiction.
For example, many people find Austen’s works “boring.” Which is an apt critique of, say, an epic adventure novel. If The Odyssey fails to pique your interest as a novel of a man’s journey across time and space to find his way home, Homer has failed to produce an “epic.” But, if your purpose and point is to demonstrate a “novel of manners” of Victorian England, then, ostensibly, it should be boring, no?
Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, Dreamland by Sam Quinones, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy.
Death as a dreamless sleep? No! They need somewhere to spend eternity for the brokenness caused as a direct result of their avarice.