‘Demon Copperhead’ is a masterpiece

I love it when things just magically fall into place. In this case, those “things” were “Demon Copperhead,” the brilliant novel that won its author the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and two book clubs that I belong to.

Barbara Kingsolver is the distinguished writer who won the Pulitzer for her novel about a teenaged boy growing up in Appalachia in the face of generational poverty and fractured families. It’s a portrait of a region accustomed to being ignored or mocked, as well as a tale of one boy’s inner strength and resilience.

A men’s book club that I recently joined chose it earlier this year to read and discuss in late May. Coincidentally, the online book club I joined through Portland State University’s Alumni Association also picked the book as our May-July selection.

I was going to read the book on my own anyway, but having everything fall into place was sweet.

Last October, I saw Kingsolver speak at a Literary Arts event in Portland. It was shortly after she’d won the Pulitzer and I was intrigued by what she had to say in conversation with Northwest author Jess Walter (one of my favorites, btw).

Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky and has lived for many years on a farm in southwestern Virginia, so she’s seen firsthand the conditions that have made Appalachian residents, largely poor and white, the object of pity or ridicule: the loss of jobs in coal and tobacco, the scourge of the opioid epidemic, substandard public education, ineffective state and local government, a sense of hopelessness.

Kingsolver said she set out to write a modern-day version of the mid-19th century classic “David Copperfield.” In the original, Charles Dickens told the story of a young English boy named David, born six months after his father’s death, who struggles to become a man in a cruel world, with little money and few people to guide him.

For her novel, Kingsolver spent years researching and developing the story she told through the eyes of a boy, who’s born to a teenage mother in a single-wide trailer and soon becomes orphaned when she dies of a drug overdose. The red-headed boy, born as Damon Fields, quickly picks up a schoolyard nickname that plays off his “attitude” and copper-wire hair in addition to the copperhead snakes that populate western Virginia.

The book is magnificent.

All seven of us guys who gathered to discuss it over lunch agreed that the quality of writing was superb.

How, we wondered, did a woman in her 60s manage to write in the voice of a young adolescent male? From the first page to the last of its 546 pages, Kingsolver captures the vocabulary, inner thoughts, raw energy and gradual maturing of young Damon (er, Demon) as he encounters one setback after another as a kid with no family, no agency.

After his mom’s death, he’s got to deal with her violent boyfriend, survive multiple foster care placements and fend for himself as a social outcast. He’s got to navigate high school boredom, teen romance, a serious football injury, and the temptation to dive into painkilling drugs.

Through Demon, we come to know the sad reality of growing up around people trapped by low expectations and few opportunities in a small, forgotten town. Many of us would be worn out and ground down by despair, but Demon is a survivor.

Early on, he realizes, “If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight!”

Later, he’s reading a book for a high school class when he’s reminded of “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.”

My fellow readers and I also marveled at the layers of issues addressed in the book.

Kingsolver shows us the norms and cultural values that shape Appalachia and reveals how Big Pharma sank its hooks into a vulnerable population of poor Americans. She addresses the public school and foster care systems, substance abuse, domestic violence, the failing economy, regional stereotypes and more.

But the book also is about family loyalty and love, determination and toughness — qualities that show the humanity of Demon and the people closest to him.

Born in 1955, Barbara Kingsolver earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times in her adult life she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.

“Demon Copperfield” has been compared to “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2016 memoir by J.D. Vance that came out in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and was held up as a way to understand the struggles of America’s white working class. (Of course, that was before Vance, now a U.S. senator from Ohio, did a 180 and aligned himself with Trump.)

I read the Vance book, too, but found Kingsolver’s novel the superior work.

Whereas Vance’s memoir focused on himself and his immediate family, Kingsolver introduced several characters to help tell a larger story. Among them: a young social worker, various foster families, a fellow foster kid, the small-town football coach, the coach’s daughter, a married interracial pair of teachers who take an interest in Demon, and assorted friends and family members.

Bottom line: Vance pretty much told one story – his own – while “Demon Copperhead” gave us glimpses of several stories that added up to a broader, emblematic one about Lee County, Virginia.

I’ve previously read one Kingsolver book out of the 10 bestselling novels she’s written along with books of poetry, essays and creative nonfiction. That was “The Posionwood Bible,” her 1998 novel about a missionary family in the Belgian Congo during the colony’s struggle for independence. It remains one of my favorite books of all time — and now I can add “Demon Copperhead” to that list.

It’s a masterpiece.

Barbara Kingsolver’s website: http://barbarakingsolver.net/books/

A final thought: Several of us in the men’s book club had personal reflections as we read “Demon Copperhead.”

Mine? I couldn’t help but contrast Demon’s hellish existence with that of our youngest son, whom we adopted as a 4-month-old. He, too, was born to an unwed teenage mother.

Demon had to scrap and fight for everything — food, housing, friendship — whereas our son grew up with all the comforts of a stable family, with college-educated parents, in a middle-class neighborhood. Last month, our baby boy, now 36, received a Ph.D in microbiology from an Ivy League institution, an amazing achievement that even now makes me wonder whether it was more the result of nature or nurture.

How would his life be different had he been raised by that teen mom or a another adoptive family?