Book: Demon Copperhead
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Reviewed By: Paul Varian, Ex-CNN Senior Editor/Executive Producer
Demon Copperhead is probably the most brilliantly written novel I’ve ever read, so captivating that, more than six months after I finished it, I couldn’t put it down when I was paging through it again to prepare for this review.
Inspired by Charles Dickens’ 1850 classic “David Copperfield,” the narrator is the central character, a young boy imperiled from birth by the ravages of poverty and pervasive modern-day addiction.
The story is set in Lee County in southwest Virginia near the Tennessee border in the 1990s, just as the opioid epidemic was taking root in the hill country once known mainly for its snakes and homemade hooch.
Author Barbara Kingsolver, 68, who grew up in rural Kentucky and now lives on a farm in southern Appalachia, magically conveys the thoughts, often hilarious utterances and chaotic adventures of Damon Shield from pre-puberty to early adulthood.
Following the advice embraced by most good writers, she starts from the beginning.
“First, I got myself born,” our hero tells us … a “slick, fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl” bathroom floor where his drug-addled, drunken mother had passed out.
He was rescued by the next-door neighbor, a granny who was raising the children of a daughter serving time in prison.
It happened in the single-wide trailer that became his first home. His mother, a petite, bleached-blonde 18-year-old, had lived there alone since his father died mysteriously six months earlier in a place known as Devil’s Bathtub.
She gave him her last name and a first name he thought would have been more suitable for “a candy-ass boy band singer.”
School chums later dubbed him Demon — a good fit for a kid who saw life as a struggle between superheroes and villains. Copperhead was his dad’s name. And he inherited it “once I got my copper-wire hair and some version of attitude.”
Demon’s mom is in and out of rehab during the first decade of his life. He then learns how to fend for himself on a journey that takes him from foster homes where he felt unwanted to a child labor camp where he was overworked and underfed.
He later experiences athletic and artistic triumphs but is bedeviled by adolescent romantic turmoil, funerals of drug-addicted loved ones and his own progressive drug dependence.
Through it all Demon presses his fight to stay alive by using his charm and skills to create a survival safety net: a practicing nurse, his football coach, art teacher and a librarian who provide helpful guidance during his most serious recovery effort.
The extensive cast of characters also includes.
- His best friend and next-door neighbor Maggot the meth-head.
- His bullying, tattooed, Harley-riding beer distributor stepdad Stoner.
- His middle school football mates Fast Forward and Big Bear.
- Three guys he befriended in long-term rehab who became pivotal sources of inspiration: Viking, Gizmo and Chartrain.
That experience helps him realize — finally — how lucky he is to have the talent enabling him to make a living as a cartoonist and a community of supporters who had his back.
“Demon Copperhead” won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Though drug abuse is a major theme, Kingsolver also spotlights contemporary ills like homophobia, racism and domestic violence as further context for the economic, cultural and political rift dividing rural and metropolitan America.
Ultimately it provides well-researched and illuminating insight into why there’s anger down on the farm and up in them thar hills.
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Each year, Global Atlanta asks influential readers and community leaders to review the most impactful book they read during the course of the year. This endeavor has continued annually since 2010.
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