Dave's Book Blog: "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

Perhaps the best novel I have read for a year, winner of the 2023 Women's Prize and the James Tait Black memorial prize in 2022.

The story of a young boy growing up in trailer trash rural Virginia. His dad died before he was born, his mum is a recovering drug addict. When she marries again his step-father bullies and abuses both wife and stepson. Social Services rescue him and foster him onto a farm where he is virtually slave labour with the other boys. After his mum dies, another foster placement sends him out to work in a scrapyard. Finally he runs away.

The plot mirrors that of David Copperfield which Kingsolver calls an "impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children" but this is a better book. It is long but it cuts out the prolixity. It has genuine characters with real motivations, for example whereas the impoverished and spendthrift Micawbers of the original novel foster David but fundamentally care for him, the similarly poor and extravagant McCobb family treat him as an income stream, making him sleep on the floor of the utility room and making him go out to work if he wants to actually eat.

But what makes this work stand out is the voice of the narrator. In the first place, David Copperfield is, as Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction says, "but a shadow compared with Betsy Trotwood and the Micawbers and the Heeps.” In the second place, Copperfield speaks with the hindsight voice of the mature author (fair enough, since this is an autobiographical novel) while Demon speaks with the voice of an intelligent articulate child becoming a teenager , experiencing all the joys and agonies of growing up with the added pains of poverty: frequently exhausted, always hungry (sometimes acutely so), forever aware of how his peers despised his poverty, dirty and despairing.

The only thing I didn't like, and it is a minor quibble, is the extent to which Kingsolver tries to make the characters conform. Thus Mr Murdstone is renamed Murrell Stoner, Little Em'ly is called Emmy, the Micawbers become the McCobbs. This was distracting. I kept trying to work out who was who (whom?) in the original. Worse, when there was what seemed to be a new character, like Maggot, it distracted me trying to work out whether there was a character in the original who fitted the bill. I get that it was clever; I didn't need it. The truth is the Demon Copperhead doesn't need these references to make it a brilliant book, and, in my opinion, because of the characterisations and the narrator's voice, a better book than the original.

This book works as a social commentary equal to Oliver Twist of Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield: . I knew little about the opiate problem in America, but this book blows it wide open.

This book works as an intensely involving personal drama: Demon was a character who really tugged on my heart strings. I couldn't sleep for worrying about him. When a novel affects you like that, you know it is one of the classics.

This book works.

The book is dedicated thus: "For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who've lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were"

Selected quotes:

"This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart of Christian, nonusing type of mother. Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." (Ch 1)
"A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing." (Ch 2)
"Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life." (Ch 2)
"Mom always said she would lose her mind if it wasn't screwed in." (Ch 2)
"If you're surprised a mom would discuss boyfriend hotness with a kid still learning not to pick his nose, you'be not seen the far end of lonely." (Ch 3)
"Never get back on the horse because it's going to throw you every damn chance it gets." (Ch 4)
"If you're standing on a small piece of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight." (Ch 14)
"She asked if I wanted to go to second base, which of course I did, except for not knowing exactly where that base was located. I'd heard different things." (Ch 19)
"If you push too hard, you can barrel yourself over a damn cliff." (Ch 20)
"I erased myself like a chalkboard." (Ch 21)
"Loser is a cliff. Once you've gone over, you're over." (Ch 21)
"I've had friends in high places and low since then, and some of the best were people that taught school. ... Outside of school hours they were delivery drivers or moonlighting at a gas station ... They need the extra job. Honestly need it, just to get by." (Ch 22)
"Being a long way from home isn't really your problem if you don't have one." (Ch 25)
"Shitshitshit no escape plan as usual." (Ch 28)
"I was so far behind it looked like a race with my own ass." (Ch 29)
"The world turns though. School dumps you out from top drawer to the bottom again." (Ch 30)
"Math, pop quiz. 'Simplify the expression using order of operations blah blah rational numbers.' A page of numbers and stuff not even numbers, like freaking code. 'Here's your simplified expression', I wrote on my blank answer sheet. 'Fuck me'." (Ch 30)
"Lately I'd been studying the human form, aka this girl in all my classes they called Hot Sauce that sat in a chair the way ice cream melts." (Ch 30)
"If you ever met a middle school girl you know what they are: volcanic eruptions of bullshit. Every minute a new emergency, the best friend turned enemy. ... Every body part too big or too small and oh I hate this dress." (Ch 30)
"Raking leaves though. There's always more going to fall." (Ch 30)
"Any sport that's not football around here is like vanilla. Why even eat that, if they've invented flavours?" (Ch 33)
"He claimed he got his speed from being youngest in a family of nine and his mom only ever cooked for eight." (Ch 34)
"All God's children have to take a shit, but you'd never know it from the way they treat the ones that clean it up." (Ch 35)
"Everything that could be took is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive." (Ch 35)
"Everyone warns you about bad influences, but it's these things already inside you that are going to take you down." (Ch 36)
"Nothing probably had changed in that house since God was a child." (Ch 37)
"Cities? Harsh streets and doom castles." (Ch 37)
"The old cottonbottoms had lost all hope of whitey or tighty." (Ch 41)
"Charles Dickens ... 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." (Ch 45)
"We ate our pizza on the beach which I don't recommend as a tourist option because: sand." (ch 45)
"Here, all we can ever be is everything we've been." (Ch 55)
"One of those hot, rainy days where you feel like you're breathing your own breath out of a paper bag." (Ch 57)
"A fallen hero shatters into more sharp pieces than you'd believe." (Ch 57)
"Not sure why rain makes you yell across six feet of distance, but it does." (Ch 57)
"What a waste, a dead body, with most of its parts still ready and eager to work. The final humiliation of a man, that last layoff." (Ch 58)
"The body is the original asshole, it can put you on detention away from all pleasures, but it still makes you write out the list of its needs, one hundred times. I will piss and shit. I will go hungry. Thirsty was the one killing me at the moment." (Ch 60)
"City people don't look each other in the eye because they're saving their juice. A person only has so much juice, and it's ideally kept for you homeboys, not all pissed away on strangers." (Ch 61)
"The entertainments of sober living are all those best things in life that are said to be free. Breathing, sleeping, enjoying your newly regularized bowels." (Ch 61)

Kingsolver also wrote (reviewed in this blog)

On a personal note, the story of Demon Copperhead is very similar in many ways to my novel Bally and Bro. Bally is a talented artist, who is very poor, and who needs money in order to achieve his ambition of going to art college, so he is persuaded by his friend Bro to make pornography. The narrative voice is distinctive in both books and both characters are essentially innocents; both are also very hungry. My novel is shorter and more direct (and avoids drugs although sex is much more prominent) but DC has whole levels of texture that I have not yet been able to reach as a write.

July 2023; 546 pages