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)

Review: They May Not Mean To, But They Do by Cathleen Schine

 

Cathleen Schine's They May Not Mean To, But They Do is an honest and intense look at what eventually happens inside every family (if they are lucky), the passing of the torch from the eldest generation into the hands of the next generation in line. This is not always a clean and easy process and families handle it in many different ways, some more successfully than others. Here Schine shows us how the Bergman family of New York approaches the problem - and what happens next.

Eighty-six-year-old Joy Bergman now lives alone and Molly and Daniel, her two children, are worried about her. Between them, Molly and Daniel come up with several viable solutions to Joy's multiple problems (as they understand them to be) with sadness, loneliness, and the dangers of her living alone. No one should be surprised when Joy immediately and adamantly rejects each and every solution offered...but, of course, Molly and Daniel are shocked by her response. As Joy digs in her heels, reconnects with an old college admirer, and begins to carve out a new way of life for herself in the apartment she has called home for decades, Molly (who now lives in Los Angeles) and Daniel (who lives near Joy in New York City) grow more and more frustrated with their mother and each other. 

Cathleen Schine shines a bright light (excuse the unintended pun) on a situation that more and more families are facing now that so many of us are living well into our nineties. Schine shows both the humor and the frustration that is inevitably tied to the experience that children, many of them well into their sixties themselves, face when caring for their aging parents. I laughed out loud at some of what Joy was putting them and herself through, and at other points in the narrative, I felt more like crying. Schine nails it here; there is a lot to laugh about and a lot to cry about for those faced with this situation in coming years. 

They May Not Mean To, But They Do is a nice primer for what we all have ahead of us - again, if we are among the lucky ones. After reading this one, you can't say that you weren't warned.

What I'm Reading This Week

 As it turns out, I made some real progress on my planned reading last week, finishing four of the six books (Odyssey's End, Playing Games, Crow Mary, and They May Not Mean to, But They Do) that I started the week reading, abandoning one (Time Is a Killer), and making steady progress on the other (Demon Copperhead). Somewhere along the way, I also unexpectedly started reading Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout, The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks by Shauna Robinson, Somebody's Fool by Richard Russo, Where I'm From by Rick Bragg, and All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby. Three of the mid-week adds are library holds that became available quicker than anticipated and one (The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks) that just happened to catch my eye on a library shelf.

So this new reading week starts this way:

I am happy to report that I am fully immersed in the life of young Demon Copperhead and that by reading 50-60 pages a day in this remarkable coming-of-age novel, I should finish it on time for the next person waiting on it. I've read just over 400 pages now, and I'm really enjoying the vast cast of weirdos and social misfits who make up Demon's immediate world as they come and go. Finding the humanity in each of them is sometimes a challenge, but there's always a payoff with each new character. The opioid crisis portion of the book, however, is becoming a bit of a drag now.

I'm a fan of Richard Russo novels from way back, but I didn't expect to get my hands on Somebody's Fool quite so quickly (and of course, it has a two-week short fuse and is 451 pages long). This is the third book in Russo's North Bath (NY) Trilogy, following Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool. Russo's long-running character "Sully" Sullivan is now dead, and this novel focuses on his son Peter who is still in North Bath, New York, and having family and relationship problems of his own. It's good to be back in North Bath.

Elizabeth Strout is another of my favorites, and I'm enjoying my reunion with Lucy, William, and their daughters despite the rough time they are all having in Lucy by the Sea as Strout portrays all of the anxieties, grief, and disorientation that so many of us experienced in 2020 as we all listened to the experts lie to us 24-7 about the scary new virus that threatened to kill us all in our sleep. I have no idea what Strout was going for here as regards reader reaction, but my own has been a strange blending of sadness and anger...probably not what she was shooting for. 

The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks caught my eye one morning when I went to the library to pick up another book being held for me. I find it impossible to walk past any book that has the word "bookshop" in its title, so I picked this one up for a look despite its rather blah cover - and I ended up bringing it home. It's turned out to be fun so far, a book about a barely surviving store whose "silent owner" bans any book written after 1968. So...the new emergency store manager starts an underground book club and dares to sell new books under the counter. All very tongue-in-cheek.

I'm halfway through S.A. Cosby's fourth novel, All the Sinners Bleed, and to this point I don't find myself enjoying it to the degree that I did the earlier three. That may be because this one is considerably more preachy about current day politics and race relations in this country than the first three books were. It seems that a certain amount of subtlety has been sacrificed in favor of ensuring that certain points are not missed. Still a headfirst, full throttle crime novel, though, and Cosby's writing skill is as obvious as ever.

I was in the mood for an audiobook late last week, and I found this one by Rick Bragg, a man whose reflections on life I've been enjoying for a long, long time. What makes this one so special is that it is read by Rick Bragg himself in that slow Alabama drawl of his that makes these Deep South "stories" come back to life as Bragg recounts memories from his boyhood to his current life. This one - especially if you can resist the urge to kick Rick's delivery up to 125% speed on your device - is just kind of beautiful to anyone having grown up in small town America. 

So there you have it, the plan. Now I can't wait to see the surprises that come out of nowhere.

Review: Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom

 

Set primarily in the 1870s and 1880s, Kathleen Grissom's novel Crow Mary is a fictionalized look at the very real Cypress Hills Massacre that occurred in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the spring of 1873. The ambush caught a small tribal group of Nakodas completely by surprise, and the ensuing slaughter of forty innocent men, women, and children forever changed the lives of Crow Mary and her white trading-post-owner husband who witnessed the whole thing. 

Once the drunken massacre is underway, it is impossible for anyone to stop it without being themselves killed. But after Mary witnesses five female survivors being taken inside the camp of the men who killed their families, she knows that she will either rescue them or die trying. After her husband forbids her to approach the camp, Mary knows that she - and her two pistols - will be doing it all alone. So she does. 

The novel begins with a short foreword written by Nedra Farwell Brown, a great-granddaughter of Crow Mary herself. Brown is understandably proud that her grandmother's story is finally being celebrated this way, and says this about Crow Mary: 

"My great-grandmother, Goes First, who became known as Crow Mary, was a beautiful, strong young woman who married a white man she did not know. That she faced this world with such bravery makes me proud to think that I carry her blood."

Crow Mary explores a period during which the native population on both sides of this country's northern border were being pushed into ever shrinking reservations and denied the ability to feed and clothe their families in the manner their ancestors had done the job for countless generations. They were told that they could no longer hunt outside the arbitrary boundaries of their new "reservations," and that  the government would supply them with the food they needed if it was not available to them within those boundaries. The politicians wanted to turn them all into subsistence farmers and cattle ranchers. But as it turns out, that would lead to the bloody fighting that marked the rest of the decade. 

Crow Mary and Abe Farwell tried to put things right after the Cypress Hills Massacre, testifying in trials on both sides of the border against the men who participated in the slaughter. Sadly, the chief result of their efforts was a lifetime of denunciation and hatred directed toward Farwell as being nothing but a traitor to his race; no convictions of the killers were handed down by either of the biased juries. Crow Mary is as much Abe's story as it is Mary's even though Abe suffered in a whole different way than his wife.

Readers interested in the history of this period will, I think, come away from Crow Mary with a clearer understanding of what a clash of cultures this all really was, and how tragically misguided and callus those in charge of policy were. Sadly, it all seems so inevitable, even in retrospect, that it triggers my general feeling of pessimism about the human race...are we any better today, really?

Why Is It So Difficult for Barnes & Noble to Get It Right?

 I suppose I'm being oversensitive about the relatively new Barnes & Noble "Rewards Card" program, but my limited experience in the program screams SCAM very loudly. 

The basics: B&N pushes this heavily at checkout, and because it was a quick sign-up process (hand over an email address and get your new card in about two minutes) I went along with it. The program says that for every $10 spent, the customer will receive one digital "stamp," and that ten stamps will earn you a $5 store credit. So, effectively, you are getting a 5% rebate on every $100 spent...not much, but what the heck; it's more than I was getting before and it pays a little over one-half of the sales tax due on any given purchase. 

But here's the kicker: One day last week I bought a $35 book, and today I bought a $17 book. That's a total of $52 before sales tax, so I would expect to have earned five digital stamps at this point. But no way is B&N going to bother to keep track of actual spending. Instead they round down to 3 stamps on purchase number one, and one stamp on purchase number two, resulting in four stamps. The additional $12 spent earns squat. 

The main reason I find this so irritating is that it's just another sign of how stupid retailers believe their customers are. If B&N can keep track of how many stamps I have in my specific account, they can keep track of my true cumulative spending. It's the same process. As it is, the whole plan is borderline ridiculous, but this little trick of theirs to round down on every purchase definitely throws it into the "not worth the effort" category for me. 

Yep, I'm feeling cantankerous today...as I'm sure you can tell. 

Review: Odyssey's End by Matt Coyle

 

(Odyssey's End is book number ten in Matt Coyle's Rick Cahill series, a series unfamiliar to me before I decided to read this volume. It is scheduled for publication on November 14, 2023.)

By this point in his career, Rick Cahill has been through life's wringer and he's very lucky to be alive, much less still out there battling the bad guys like he does. In addition to all of his old injuries, Cahill is also now facing the onset of a brain disease (CTE) that he recognizes is messing with his emotions, especially his temper. Much worse, he knows that the disease has the potential to kill him even while it steals his memories and personality. Cahill's wife recognizes the symptoms, too, and she and their young daughter have moved into the home of her parents where she feels the little girl will be better protected from exposure to Cahill's temper. 

Cahill knows the clock is now ticking faster than ever for him and that he still has not banked enough to provide for his young daughter's future. He wants to keep working as a San Diego private investigator as long as he can, putting away as much as he can every step of the way. That's why when an old enemy of his approaches Cahill with what seems like a simple missing person's case (one that pays very well), Cahill decides to take the case despite all of his instincts telling him there has to be more to the case than he's being told.

Rick Cahill is a sympathetic character and it's difficult not to root for him; he's the obvious good guy in the novel. But the bulk of the story reads like a conventional thriller rather than one about a man suffering major disabilities, both mental and physical. The story is well plotted and written, and longtime readers of the series are likely to enjoy it very much. New readers like me, however, would have been better served, I think, by a deeper exploration of the brain disease Cahill is so concerned about. As it is, I did not feel nearly the sympathy for the character that I probably should have felt. And that's kind of a shame.