Review: Demon Copperhead

 

 This time for sure, the Pulitzer Prize people got it right. Only once before do I remember reading a novel this long (546 pages) and wishing that it had been another 500 pages long - and that other one also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 

Simply put, Demon Copperhead is a fiction masterpiece. For almost two weeks now I've felt as if I were living deep in the heart of the most poverty-stricken and drug-riddled communities of Appalachia as everything collapsed around me. Here, using the theme (that institutional poverty damages children almost beyond recovery) and basic structure of the Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield, Barbara Kingsolver examines the death and destruction pushed upon the poorer communities of America by the Purdue crime family of such "Big Pharma" notoriety. 

The book's narrator is a boy who is born on the floor of a single-wide house trailer to a destitute teenager who has no means or abilities to support herself, much less herself plus a new baby. Even worse, the boy's father, a young man who might have made all the difference in their lives, did not live to see the birth of his son. Somehow, the boy survives his unattended entrance into the world despite the odds and the addictions of his mother.

"Demon Copperhead" himself begins to tell his story right from the beginning with the words,

"First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it."

 ...giving readers get just a hint of the wild ride they are about to embark upon.

Orphaned at an early age, Demon depends for his survival on the kindness of the elderly couple who had let his mother live in the trailer he was born in. But it is only a matter of time before the system steps in and takes over "on his behalf," and after that happens Demon is placed into one questionable foster home situation after another. Demon, though, if nothing else was born a fighter and a surviver, and he manages to do both things right up until the moment his knee is shattered in a high school football game coached by the man who has signed on as Demon's legal guardian. 

Hello, Dr. Doom, hello Purdue pusher-family, hello opioids, hello crippling addiction. From now on nothing matters more than feeding that addiction, and all bets are off.

Demon Copperhead could not have been any shorter and done justice to the chemical plague foisted upon the working poor by the Purdue family of criminals (who ended up paying a substantial fine to the government while still managing to walk away with the bulk of their corrupt gains). Sadly, those fines were paid directly to the government, and no reparations to speak of ever reached the families and individuals who had their lives destroyed by the Purdues.

But on a lighter note...who knew that Kingsolver has such a subtle sense of humor (maybe I'm the last one to find that out). And what's not to like about a novelist who gives readers credit for knowing that a dog named "Hazel Dickens" is a political statement in itself about the dog's owners? Or that she calls out the Purdue family by name?

Two of my favorite quotes from Demon Copperhead:

"Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner but Christ Jesus 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." (Spoken to the reader by Demon after he discovers a love of reading and the novel David Copperfield)

and 

 "A year is a long time away from the wheel. Straight into city driving, quite the plunge. I tried to keep my eyes open and channel June Peggot parallel parking outside Atlanta Starbucks. I'm in awe of that maneuver to this day. Men have married women for less reason." 

Demon Copperhead surprised me. I knew it was supposed to be good, but I never really expected it to be, at least to this point, my favorite book of 2023. 

Barbara Kingsolver (Author Photo)