Demon Copperhead, a Novel by Barbara Kingsolver, a Review

 

Demon Copperhead, a 2022 novel by the prolific author Barbara Kingsolver, is well worth the read. That is, if you have patience; it is over 500  pages in length—(In my case, I had gotten very ill on vacation, and  for a while had very limited mobility. So I just sat in a corner and read.)

It has been written that Kingsolver visited a house where Dickins lived. She apparently felt like writing a novel that not only updated Dickins but would take place in a section of the country she loves and in which she lives, Appalachia. She apparently ‘channeled Dickens', who informed her to let the title character speak for himself. I doubt if there are many novels written Holden Caulfield-like, in the first person singular in which an adolescent male is the main character, let alone one written by a woman; in this case, the novel is a truly resounding success. Writing in Dickens’s footsteps, is, however, a tough act to follow.

As I see it, her purpose in writing this novel was first and foremost to entertain, but, that said, she was apparently interested in bringing her beloved and besieged Appalachia to life, basing the characters very loosely on Dickens’s great novel. She certainly succeeded.

She is a staunch defender of her ‘neck of the woods,’ a large swath of the country that has been devastated by big business whose exploitations of the area is and was criminal, followed by the push of oxycontin by Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which has left so many families in the area in ruins. One would think that  there would  be powerful Anna Sewells for every beaten down horse in existence, but not so. Almost  beaten down Appalachia was beaten down even further by shameless persons whose only god is the almighty dollar.  Kingsolver has, in fact, a very non-Dickensian character by the name of Kent, a pharmaceutical rep paid by Purdue, who did his very best to make a lot of money--which he of course did--; if, as he knew, he was ruining lives in  the meantime, so what? I love the expression, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man; it has been the modus operandi of nearly everyone everywhere, since time immemorial. Some wolves are more ravenous than others, no doubt about that.

I think it’s safe to say that the author and I have similar political views. In the book, especially at the beginning she hints at these views in Damon’s voice at a time when a kid would hardly be politically aware. But she brilliantly succeeds in asserting politics later in the novel, when Damon is a student in middle school. One of his teachers is Mr. Armstrong, an African American who loves the area as well, and even plays the banjo in a Blue Grass band. If this combination seems unlikely to you, do recall that the world is a strange place; besides,  the character is very convincingly drawn. Kingsolver takes the racism of the area—and alas! of just about all areas of the world—head-on, Mr. Armstrong, confronted in the class, some members of which support the Confederate flag and conflate that support with patriotism, says the following:

“All right, let’s start with the obvious here,” Mr. Armstrong said. The Confederacy and the United States were opposite sides of a war.”

Still quiet. Among our kind there is stuff not talked about. And stuff not done, including insulting people straight to their faces.

We know words that were not proper noun capital Black being said; we definitely heard those, from older guys or parents or whoever, people ticked off over something they never met firsthand and knew nothing about. No real person…

“People,” Mr. Armstrong finally kind of yelled, like he did whenever we   were ignorant in class. "Are you following me here? A war. Opposite sides. Flying these flags at once makes no sense. It’s like rooting for the Generals and Abingdon Falcons (two local and very much opposing football teams) in the same game.” 

                                                        --page 266

Kudos to Barbara Kingsolver for having written that! Although, as a member of a mixed-race family  that includes prominent Black members, I would have been more critical of the racist views common in all areas of my country; but the author, extremely sensitive to criticism of Appalachian lives, has her heart in the right place.

Kingsolver apparently wrote a letter to the author of Hillbilly Elegies," and chided him for his condescending views. My view is this: Who am I to judge? People of Appalachia are not different from anyone else. Members of this relatively poor and extensively exploited area, deserve not only our sympathy, but admiration. (What would I be able to learn from so many Appalachians? A lot, a whole lot.)

Still, I wish she had written something about class. The prejudice against Appalachians has more to do with class than anything else. So-called ‘trailer trash” has its equivalents in the so-called White, Black and Brown trash in the rest of America. Everyone is a child of God; that we have forgotten this is our tragedy as well as the tragedy of the world.

Although her Dickens-based characters come short of the comic genius of the original, Demon Copperhead is still a miraculous achievement. Besides, where is MacBird, a play from the sixties based on Shakespeare, now?

I am convinced that Demon Copperhead will still be widely read by future generations. And if they don’t, it will be their loss!