I was chatting with my friend Joe yesterday about how Pulitzer Prize winners are so consistently good. Demon Copperhead is no exception. Barbara Kingsolver is certainly among the greatest living authors in America today and in this book she gives her home region of Appalachia the careful and delicate literary treatment it deserves.
Kingsolver’s retelling and re-setting of David Copperfield in Southwestern Virginia in the early 2000s, just when the Sacklers were conjuring their opiates and the arguments to get the public addicted to them hit the hardest.1 One character, a pharma rep from Purdue, makes the case that pain is the sixth receptor and therefore, I guess, you should take these medications to block it? These were real arguments the pain lobby and pharma reps made. It’s astonishing to me that the pain lobby still defends this behavior and their role in the opioid crisis.
But predation on the vulnerable is not the driver of this book, nor is it even the main villain. Kingsolver is going for, as Demon might put it, the whole banana. It’s a comprehensive and emotive window into how a young person can be vacuumed into a life marred by vulnerability from an early age. Demon is 11 or younger throughout most of this book. He’s set up with foster families that clear the low bar of “safe” by simply not beating their fosters. Yet he already endured an entire lifetime before he even reaches high school.
Poverty porn is a real phenomenon, but not what this book is. One of Kingsolver’s gifts as a writer is to not allow the reader to get away with thinking that every person or child in the South suffers from addiction, or experiences hunger or deep poverty, or even that any child anywhere has the same experience as Demon’s. Neither does she draw characters that are not full humans with agency, compassion, and emotion. Reading this book helps you to understand how any person could become addicted to opioids as a high school freshman; how a person could become pregnant in middle school; or how entire communities could come to distrust institutions. It helps you understand how someone can live with addiction, see paths out, but make intentional choices not to take them. At no point does Demon ask for pity nor rescue. Instead, he demands only your attention, and the same measure of compassion he shows the people in his life.
This book is nearly 600 pages long, but not a slog. It’s a page turner that hurts your hands a little to hold. It wakes you up in the morning, begging to be read; distracts you from work, parenting, life, in order to keep showing up for Demon. It’s also, at times, very funny. I wanted to be reading it with someone else because I was so eager to talk to someone about what happened, and what might be coming, to Demon Copperhead.
There’s a Milwaukee folk rocker named Trapper Schoepp. He shared his experience surviving addiction at a show we attended two Christmases ago. After that he played a song called Satan is Real (Satan is a Sackler). It is on his latest release, Osborne, and I found myself thinking about it as I read certain parts of this book. Highly recommend both.
- As many other (read: professional) reviewers noted, you do not need to have read or remember anything about Copperfield to read and enjoy this book. ↩︎