Charles Dickens’s “favourite child” among his novels was David Copperfield, the quasi-autobiographical story of an impoverished child done good amid the stratified class system of Victorian England. In her 10th novel, Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver grafts this tale on to the equally stratified milieu of 1990s and 2000s America.
The setting is Lee County, Virginia, “world capital of the lose-lose situation”. Readers might also recognise it as the setting of Beth Macy’s book turned TV series Dopesick (2018), which charted the campaign by Big Pharma to get working-class Americans hooked on prescription opioids. The resulting opioid crisis has also been extensively documented in books like Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain (2021).
So, the two central elements of Demon Copperhead are familiar, yet Kingsolver’s rich and lively style makes the whole thing feel fresh.
Damon Fields, aka Demon Copperhead, is born to a mother who is “let’s just say out of it” and a father who is already deceased. By the time he’s 11, he has endured the wrath of a cruel stepfather, and his mother has died of an overdose. “At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse,” he says. “Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.” So, we see him dragged through a broken foster system, labelled untouchable by peers, cowed by labour, hunger and addiction. Apart from a brief high as a college football star, he’s constantly learning the same bleak lesson: “Nothing but rainy days ahead … You will be knocked down again … Never get back on the horse, because it’s going to throw you every damn chance it gets”.
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Though Dickens was a chronicler of the social ills of his time, his books were best loved as entertainment. Likewise, though Kingsolver takes aim at numerous social issues — institutional impoverishment, hillbilly prejudice, underfunding in school and social care systems, the modern opioid crisis — readers are more likely to warm to the story than any message it imparts. Indeed, the message implicit in the trajectory of many a Dickens hero is that individual superiority will save you from systemic adversity.
Where Copperfield has preternatural talents as a writer, Copperhead has preternatural talents as a comic strip artist. And he’s endowed with the “promise from God” that he’ll “never drown”. Only the anointed are saved. It’s not the most pleasing message, but enchanted as we are by our hero, and the expert way his story is told, it’s hard to wish for anything else for dear Demon.
