Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver's
Demon Copperhead openly reworks David Copperfield, transplanting its orphaned
narrator into rural Virginia during the opioid epidemic, and the structural
debt to Dickens gives Kingsolver a scaffolding sturdy enough to support the book's
much darker, more contemporary material. Demon narrates his own story, from
foster care through addiction and eventual reckoning, in a voice that is sharp,
funny, and unsparing about the systems that failed him at nearly every turn.
The novel's real
achievement is refusing to let its Appalachian setting become either caricature
or simple tragedy; Kingsolver, who grew up in the region, writes its landscape
and its people with specificity and evident affection even as she indicts the institutions,
foster care, the school system, the pharmaceutical industry, that fail them.
Demon's voice carries the book almost entirely, and it holds up across its
considerable length.
The book's scope and
ambition occasionally show; some sections sag under the weight of everything
Kingsolver wants to cover, and the Dickensian plotting can feel schematic in
places where it's clearly serving the source text more than the story's own momentum.
Even so, the novel's anger and its compassion are both genuine, and the
combination is a large part of why it earned the acclaim it did.
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