I'm a bit late to the party on Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling and now Pulitzer-prize-winning retelling of David Copperfield about a comics-loving, big-hearted, orphaned Appalachian boy, riding the tragic wave of the opioid epidemic. I've been a Kingsolver fan for over twenty years—Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna are long-time favorites of mine, and I also enjoyed The Bean Trees and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. That said, I've struggled to get into some of her more recent work and was initially skeptical of Demon Copperhead, partly because I'd never read Dickens. Only after numerous friends recommended it did I finally succumb and read it for myself. While there's probably a lot I missed in terms of how Demon Copperhead works in conversation with David Copperfield, I can assure you the book does not rely on readers' familiarity with Dickens and the Pulitzer committee made an excellent choice. This is one of the most ambitious and gorgeously executed novels I've read that was written in the past year.
The protagonist, Demon, is the Melungeon son of a recovering addict in tobacco country and dreams of seeing the ocean; he also longs to unravel the mystery of his father, who died before he was born. (If you, like me, had never heard the word Melungeon before, it refers to people of mixed European, African, and/or Native American ancestry in Appalachia.) Demon tells the story of his incredibly hard-knock life and wrestles with what it means to love a place and a family that also to some extent seems to have doomed him to limited opportunities. As he puts it early in the book: "This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, non-using type of mother. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose. Me though, I was born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe?"
The book is not without minor flaws: it drags in the long, dark middle (this is a man-in-a-hole plot, and the hole gets deep indeed), and I had some quibbles with the accuracy of Kingsolver's portrayal of high school in the early 'aughts, having experienced it firsthand. I also wondered if a few flatter minor characters (particularly the wholly unredeemed football assistant turned assistant coach who appears during Demon's high school years) were there less to serve this story and more to mirror minor characters in Dickens' book. On the flip side, the writing is gutsy and full of flair, the broad cast of major characters is richly drawn, and the majority of the book is well-paced and engrossing. Kingsolver paints a much more nuanced portrait of the experiences of mostly working class white people in Appalachia than the derisive stereotypes commonly perpetuated in popular culture. The ending also beautifully rounds out the book; it's my favorite kind—the I felt like I should have seen coming, but didn’t.
In the absence of a superhero rescue, Demon must find his own way out of the depths of addiction and loss. In his own words, "One thing I learned from Mr. Armstrong while striving heartily to remain uneducated: a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it." Demon Copperhead the novel does the same.