Barbara Kingsolver - Demon Copperhead

Reading Demon Copperhead was not an easy process for me. Barbara Kingsolver has taken, as her inspiration, Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield and its bildungsroman format. Her central character, Demon Copperhead, like Dickens' titular hero, faces trials and tribulations as he grows old. The book takes from Dickens' many characters and names, scenarios and events. But, as a reader, I was struck mostly by the tribulations. Each time Demon's life seemed to make a turn for the better, tragedy or disaster, awaited around the corner.

Demon Copperhead is set in West Virginia, an area of the eastern United States that Kingsolver knows well and features in several of her works. It is an intimate portrait of an area devastated by the loss of the mining industry and provided historical work, and yet an area that remains shaped by that industry and its legacy.  The collapse of the industry has left in its wake unemployment, under-employment, hunger and brutal poverty - and a drug crisis that shapes Demon's life from his birth. His mother is a recovering addict, who loves Demon dearly, but whose life is reversed when she gets together with a new love - a man who brings violence and abuse into Demon's life. Following his mother's death, his neighbours provide love and support, until child services drag Demon away - adding him to a treadmill that puts orphans at the mercy of people who use kids to bolster their workplaces and finances. Their's no love her.

Kingsolver gives her youthful hero a great deal of agency - while he suffers each stage of his life, he constantly tries to break free - though constantly suffering the sort of setback that made this reader grind his teeth in anxiety. His big break, symbolic perhaps of the get out offered to a handful of lucky young men, is a chance on the football team - only to have that snatched away by the inevitable (in this novel anyway) injury - that forces him into opiate addiction.

It's a brutal book, and I found the despair and misery very hard work. But the misery is tempered by hope and solidarity - the community that does look after one another, the social workers that do their best, and the neighbours that support their friends and family. And there is also love.

But other than the individual escape there is little hope. One of Demon's better teachers tells them of the heroic past of the region - the people of the mining towns who fought pitched battles with the mining companies, to get a little more wages for their families. But it is these same multinationals that opened the doors to the drug crisis that blight's Demon's Lee County.  

One of the women who support and love Demon makes a point of pointing out to him that the crises he faces are his fault, they have been "done to him". She encourages Demon, and the reader, to think about who has been doing this. But this is not a Marxist tract - it is a beautiful, if painful, story of hope and personal liberation. Demon's escape - if it is that - is touchingly told. The ending makes the journey worthwhile and with it Kingsolver caps perhaps the great American novel of the 21st century. Let's hope we live to see a time when all the victims of capitalism in places like Lee County, get to see their oceans too.

Related Reviews

Kingsolver - Prodigal Summer