Everyone has been raving about Demon Copperhead, but I’ve had a more mixed reaction to it. This is because the novel is an update for Dickens’s David Copperfield, which is one of my favorite books.
In one way, this is a good match, because both Dickens and Kingsolver are political writers with social consciences. Dickens’s target was the effects of industrialization on poor children. Kingsolver’s in this novel is the effects on the people of Appalachia of what she sees as a war on agriculture.
Damon Fields, named Demon Copperhead because of his red hair, is a young Melungeon (I had to look it up) boy at the start of the novel. His father died before he was born, and his teenage mother has a very weak control of her sobriety. Residents of Lee County in Southwestern Virginia, they live in a single-wide mobile home owned by the Peggots next door. The kindly Peggots provide most of the stability in young Demon’s life.
Readers familiar with David Copperfield will be familiar with the plot, for it follows that book almost exactly. Although they are very poor, things are going fairly well and Demon’s mother has been sober for two years when she meets Stoner, soon to become Demon’s abusive stepfather. It goes mostly downhill from there, with Demon, after a brief career as a high school football hero, becoming addicted to oxy after an injury.
I couldn’t help noticing differences from Dickens, though. For one thing, the McCob family, Kingsolver’s equivalent of the Micawbers, are not the feckless, lovable, comic characters of Dickens, but a couple who, as Demon’s foster family, illegally send him to work instead of school, illegally charge him rent, and steal his money. (The Micawbers send David to work, too, but that assumed to be at the behest of his stepfather.) That leads to the biggest difference. Although Kingsolver can depict sympathetic characters, she doesn’t really do funny ones, Dickens’s gift. Further, the very young Demon at the beginning of the novel lacks the absolute innocence of young David that makes him so endearing. Demon’s narrative is too cynical.
Finally, Dickens is more willing than Kingsolver to let his story make his political points. Still, it’s a gripping novel with a serious message about the rural addiction problem, the lack of services for rural citizens, and the mistreatment of the poor. Although I read this novel before it made the list, Demon Copperhead is part of my James Tait Black project.