REVIEW OF DEMON COPPERHEAD Barbara Kingsolver

By Tom Wells 

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

 

Barbara Kingsolver has said in interviews that a novel is not worth writing if it does not have a social purpose. She has adopted as her muse Charles Dickens, whose novels addressed such Victorian ills as child labour, debtor's prison and anti-Catholic bigotry.  With DEMON COPPERHEAD—a deserved Pulitzer Prize Winner and one of the great American novels of this or any century--she has taken Dickens's most autobiographical novel, DAVID COPPERFIELD, and transformed it into a funny, heartbreaking and searing critique of two of America's most pressing problems, social inequality and opioid addiction.  

 

Like its progenitor, DEMON COPPERHEAD is a first-person account of a boy's harrowing journey to manhood, one that includes parental death, step-fatherly abuse, labour exploitation and homelessness, his only relief coming from the fortuitous discovery of a caring maternal relative. Yet, whereas David Copperfield encounters hardship despite his avoidance of moral pitfalls, Damon Fields (aka Demon Copperhead) is too often the author of his own troubles, notably when he chooses self-medication over surgery for a football knee injury and when he seals his first carnal embrace with a fentanyl kiss.

 

Still, it's not as if Demon has had the benefit of sound adult guidance in support of his decision-making. Whatever positive influence he manages to find himself under—from Mrs. Peggot, Aunt June, Betsy Woodall and Coach Winfield--tends to be doled out in small doses before invariably dissipating or disappearing altogether. And their ministrations are nowhere near enough to overcome the circumstances and consequences of Demon's birth. "If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they're slapping the kid she's shunted out, telling him to look alive, likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie."  Which is what Demon becomes, with no small push from a drug industry providing ample incentive to the medical profession to prescribe opioids as miracle cures when they are nothing more than highly addictive palliatives. 

 

The only miracle here is that Demon survives, ultimately with the help of Angus, his one reliable friend, to glimpse a future with a sliver of hope. For Doom has ordained not only Demon's descent into addiction but also his immunity from death in the ocean. Which is where he and Angus are heading as the story comes to an end. "The trip itself, just the getting there, possibly the best part of my life so far. That's where we are. Well past the Christianberg exit. Past Richmond and still pointed east. Headed for the one big thing that is not going to swallow me alive."

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