THE SUNDAY REVIEW | DEMON COPPERHEAD – BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Is there anyone out there in bookland who hasn’t heard of this book? It feels like it has been taking the reading world by storm over the past year, and being discussed by… well, pretty much everyone. It co-won the Pulitzer Prize and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction – which saw Barbara Kingsolver become the first woman to win the award twice (she previously won in 2010 for The Lacuna). And it was my number one pick for this year’s BookTube Prize – which it deservedly won (head over to the website to see a video she recorded in acknowledgement of the prize). I’ve also been a fan of Kingsolver’s writing since I was a teenager – having first picked up her work when my mum raved about her. The Bean Trees was my first of her books (I now see all the problematic elements of the book, but the protagonist is still a favourite and the writing was top notch), but I continued on from there with Pigs in Heaven and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

But despite all of this, I wasn’t planning to read Demon Copperhead. I knew it would be excellent. I knew it is one I’d like to know my opinion of to engage in discussion. And yet, the synopsis was not one that appealed to me, being a tale of drug addiction, poverty and violence. I just don’t have the constitution for that kind of book these days, nor do I want to spend more than 500 pages wallowing in misery. The fact that it’s a re-telling of Charles Dickens’ classic David Copperfield further alienated me, as I’ve never read it and felt intimidated by the connection. I was challenged to read it, however, when I judged the final round of the BookTube Prize and this was one of the six books in the final fiction round. So I really didn’t have a choice. And boy, am I grateful for that push!

This is the story of Demon Copperhead, so named after his father, and because his name was Damon. Born in the caul to a drug addicted teenager in a trailer in Appalachia, Demon does not have the most promising start in life. And it’s not an uphill climb from there. He is dealt blow after blow, loss after loss, heartache after heartache. And yet he is also dealt several lucky breaks – and though these come in the form of opportunities, the people who are involved and become tied to him turn out to be the bigger blessings.

Though the story is excellent and the writing superb, it was the narrator, Demon himself, who made this a book I not only respected but thoroughly enjoyed. Despite the subject matter and circumstances, Demon made me want to spend that 500+ pages with him. He has a voice that draws you in, makes you care, and has a subtle lilt of humour and intelligence that carries through all the pain. He’s the character I will now think of anytime the word “charisma” is mentioned to me. He is definitely charismatic.

He also has that rare ability to maintain a core sense of self no matter the struggles he’s trying to dig his way out of. No matter what life throws at him, he remains himself, and that is the source of his strength and will to live. I love characters like this. The kind who drop philosophical and essentially true lines despite lacking breadth of experience or perspective. The kind who inspire you to stick to what you know is right and try to help others, even when all seems bleak. The kind who make you want to do better, to be better, no matter your starting point. I loved Demon, and I kept right on loving him to the very last page of the book. It’s summed up in this passage:

“[…]He’s the same kind of good like you are. Like there’s some metal or something in you that won’t melt down, no matter what.”
“Oh, I melt down. I could show you some fine broken shit.”
She still wasn’t looking at me. “I’m saying you wake up and you’re still yourself, every day. I’m not like that, I give in. I change my recipe, to suit people.” p. 462

Kingsolver managed to not only capture the experiences of addiction, loss, abuse, homelessness, loneliness, poverty and lost potential perfectly, but she managed to embody the voice of this young man whose life has been nothing but, and man did I ever believe him to be real. I don’t know how she did it, but her writing prowess in this novel deserved every single accolade and rave review. The woman can write. Some of my new favourite lines are Demon’s, like this one:

“I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore.” p. 211

I relate to this so much. I don’t have a childhood home to go back to that feels at all like home. It’s a place that exists, but not one I ever want to go back to again. It’s not home. This country where I’ve lived my whole life doesn’t feel half as much like I belong to it as the country my parents left when they came here. And yet this feeling, this longing for a place that feels safe and familiar, where you belong, is one that I’ve carried with me for my entire adult life and never managed to find. I know this feeling; I know it in my bones.

Another one:

“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.” p. 468

If there was ever a line that sums up life in a tidy little shell, this would be it. This is why life hurts so much – everything you gain and lose between birth and death is the very spirit of life, and also what makes it so damn painful to live. I love how these little gems of thought are phrased – the way they sound through and through like they come from Demon, like they’re his own. No matter how universal the truth he’s talking about.

I’m going to include a few more quotes from the book that stuck out to me, because there were so many and these ones really blew my mind:

“Is it the hardest thing I’ve ever done? No. Just the hardest one I had any choice about.” p. 509

“I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor, and there’s city poor. As much of my life as I’d spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, I was seeing more to the picture now. I mean yes, that is where they all grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them. Chartrain was always discussing “hustle,” and it took me awhile to understand he grew up hungry for money like it was food. Because for him, they’re one and the same. Not to run the man down, but he wouldn’t know a cow from a steer, or which of them gave milk. No desperate men Chartrain ever knew went out and shot venison if they were hungry. They shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about.
I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the holes where you’ve lost teeth.” p. 513

“[…] a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.” p. 520

“[…] I’ve made any number of false starts with this mess. You think you know where your own troubles lie, only to stare down the page and realize, no. Not there. It started earlier. Like these wars going back to George Washington and whiskey. Or in my case, chapter 1. First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me. Here we are.” p. 526

You can get a pretty good sense of what you can expect from this book by reading these small snippets – but the whole damn book is that good. I didn’t want it to end, even when I did  because the stuff that was happening was so hard to bear witness to. But I wanted to spend that time with Demon, I wanted to learn more about him and I wanted more than anything for him to find his feet in a world dead set on knocking him hard to the ground.

I won’t tell you anything about how this story goes – you need to find that out for yourself. But it’s not as heavy as it would seem (though it’s weighty enough), it has humour and beauty mixed into the dark, and it will bring you out of it with a new cockeyed sense of the beauty in the world around you, even in those dark places. I cannot, absolutely cannot, recommend this book too highly. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear what you thought in the comments below, and if you haven’t please do us both a favour, go check it out, and come on back and let me know!

“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. – Goodreads

Book Title: Demon Copperhead
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook
Published By: Harper
Released: October 18, 2022
Genre: Fiction, Classical Re-telling, Family, Addiction, Poverty
Pages: 546
Date Read: August 21-26, 2023
Rating: 10/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.53/5 (232,357 ratings)