Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Jesus Christ did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.
Y’know what, Demon Copperhead? For once in your self-destructive life, you got something right there. OK, so you had a bad start, with your stepfather from hell and your mom offing herself and the crappy farming out of orphans and having nothing but, you still had choices, didn’t you? And you always managed to make the wrong ones. The best thing you could do would be to light out of Virginia and time travel back to Victorian England. In Mr Dickens’ world, you could be an orphan with a crappy job, choose the wrong guy for your hero, marry the wrong girl and still come good. You stay back home with Ma Kingsolver and you’re trapped forever inside one of the most depressing books it's ever been my misfortune to read.
A couple of people said they’d be interested to know what I thought of this book. The answer is that I hated it and was completely miserable the whole time I was reading it. I had to finish, to see if Kingsolver would end the book in the same way Dickens ended David Copperfield and she does, sort of. I found the constant Copperfield references odd. There are slight changes of name: Pegott for Pegotty, Dori for Dora, Angus for Agnes. You also guess what’s coming e.g. when Demon goes off with the Pegotts for two weeks to stay with a relative, you know he’s in for a nasty shock when he gets back home. You know that Fast Forward is Steerforth made really evil. You know Dori will die. At least Angus (real name Agnes) is a vast improvement on Dickens’ Agnes.
If 550 pages of small print about what it’s like to be dirt poor in trailer trash America is your thing, this book is for you. You will have to put up with long stretches of boredom about football and addiction plus the overwriting but maybe that won’t bother you, either. In her acknowledgements, this Pulitzer Prize-winning author says, ‘I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield’, as though he wrote it especially so she could riff on it. I’m grateful to him too but for writing a faulty but beautiful book. As I see it, Demon Copperhead could have been written without any reference to Dickens and still have been quite a story, if one I wish I hadn’t read. The power of it lies in Kingsolver’s anger at the opioid crisis in America and the role of ‘big pharma’ in bringing it about.