Demon Copperhead (2022)
Barbara Kingsolver (1955)
548 pages
My mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back. (97)
At just eleven years old, the title character of Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead has had his childhood stripped away from him. And he has clear and painful awareness of what’s been lost.
Not that his life to that point had been easy, his father having died before he was born and his mother ever struggling to stay sober and hold down a job. His birth name was Damon Fields, but it didn’t take long for those around him to switch it to Demon and, having inherited his dead father’s red hair, his dad’s nickname Copperhead. The kindness of a neighboring family toward him and his mom somewhat eased his early years, allowing a boyhood spent exploring the mountain forests around his rural home. Sheltered for a time from the worst of the world, he could at least imagine the possibility of a decent future.
Events conspire, however, to crush any such hopes, culminating in a moment that definitively destroys the life he has known, forcing him to recognize that his childhood has been left irrevocably behind. It causes a profound scar, with consequences that he contends with every day that follows. He struggles to ever again generate enough faith in himself – or the world – to take a risk on a good option when it arises, as opposed to assuming that the worst path is inevitable and so might just as well be chosen upfront.
The setting both in time and place plays a core role in Kingsolver’s story. Demon grows up in the Appalachian hill country of western Virginia, near the borders with Kentucky and Tennessee. And he enters his teenage years around the turn of the 21st century, as drug use spreads like wildfire through rural communities such as his.
With mining jobs disappearing and little else besides farming and some service work for job prospects, all too many people around him are unemployed or underemployed. Underfunded social services unable to fill the huge gaps that result, people sink into poverty, leading to frustration and hopelessness. Narcotics like OxyContin come to fill the breach.
Compared to the view of OxyContin abuse one typically gets in news stories, Kingsolver gives a far more complex picture of the insidious ways that such drugs create an ecosystem of dependency.
Not surprisingly, her characters include a drug rep who wheedles and bribes doctors into prescribing increasing amounts of the painkiller to patients by providing kickbacks such as exotic vacation getaways, and doctors who freely prescribe the drugs in response. But at the heart of her story lies the impact of OxyContin availability on the community.
Users abound, of course, attempting to deaden their suffering; but some end up selling a part of what they get to other users to make money – whether to eat, pay rent or buy yet other drugs. It’s a kind of underground economy, one able to grow in the absence of other opportunities, but that only further undermines the community’s future. Demon resists this siren song of OxyContin use for a time, but finally slips into its dark embrace, hesitantly at first, then more fully, any reticence he feels overwhelmed by his desperate needs and the pit of hopelessness he’s fallen into.
And yet, Kingsolver brings sensitivity and complexity to her description of the lives of Demon and, through his experiences, his community. She distinguishes the misery and poverty weighing down the people in this region bypassed by our present-day economy, from the love of place that coexists with it. At a distance, it can be all too easy to assume that those who leave such places must think “good riddance,” while those who stay are only waiting for the opportunity to leave. The reality, Kingsolver reveals, can rather be that while those who leave simply follow a path of survival, those who elect to stay fight to do so despite the long and tough odds.
We observe this love of place through Demon’s eyes, when he ventures beyond his rural home. Early in the story he makes his first trip to a large city, traveling with family friends to Knoxville, to visit relatives. He struggles to make sense of what he sees in the city, his shock palpable. He can scarcely imagine why anyone would want to live there, describing the apartment building of the aunt they visit as a
doom castle. A thousand other families living there, every front door opening into one hallway. … Outside the main front door, a street full of cars and cars, people and people. There was no outside anywhere … no running wild here like we did at home … [a child] not on [their] own for one second, due to all the unknown people and murder potential. (23)
Much later, when he has to live in a city for an extended period, he comes to realize how
Up home, it’s different. … you want money and a job, but there’s a hundred other things you do for getting by. … Hunting and fishing, plus all the woman things, making quilts and clothes. Whether big or small, you’ve always got the place you’re living on. … Having some ground to stand on, that’s our whole basis. (516)
Demon, however different he may wish his life to have been, recognizes the goodness that accompanies the many challenges that weigh upon his community.
And, although not something Kingsolver explores directly in the story, there is a tragic dilemma for such communities. Bringing the present-day economy to the area – companies and so jobs – would increase people’s standard of living, but likely at the cost of much of what those who’ve grown up there love about their region. Not that one cannot imagine that a business could come in and attempt to fit within the existing lifestyle, but it all too often seems to take a low priority. Wendell Berry makes that point about agriculture, forestry, and mining in particular, in his powerful collection of essays, Our Only World (my review linked to at right), though his point applies broadly to businesses in a profit-focused economy:
Once they have been industrialized, they no longer recognized landscape as whole, let alone as homes of people and other creatures. (6, Berry)
Threading that needle – not losing what they have in order to gain the temptations of the modern world they see on TV – is challenging in a broader social and economic system that prizes scale and commonality and profit. As one of Demon’s friends tells him in describing what their community has been up against:
It’s the ones in charge…. They were always on the side of the money-earning [city] people, and down on the land people…. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par … to turn [us] into wage labor. … [The result has been our] two-hundred-years war to keep body and soul together on our mountains. (522-4)
This threat is pointedly captured by William Kauffman, quoted in an article in Utne Reader in 2000:
For almost 60 years, the placeless have waged war on the rooted, stealing their children, devastating their neighborhoods, wiping out local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. What we have is class war – though this war has never been acknowledged because the casualties are places and attachments and sentiments; nothings, really; everythings, in fact – waged by the mobile against the immobile, by the cosmopolitan against the rooted, and the winners are he professionals, people so depraved that they would actually move to a different place for mere money. How bizarre.
Another, more psychological challenge haunts the story for readers. While some of the pain Demon experiences results from the actions of people that he, as a child, must simply submit to, in other cases he reaches a decision point conscious of the correct, or at least better, option, but unable to choose it. With Demon as a sympathetic protagonist, it can be frustrating to watch him again and again choose the more destructive path, and to do so with full self-awareness. Through Demon, Kingsolver forces readers to recognize how someone beaten down long enough can come to imagine that pain and misery are their due, and for that reason pick the worse choice at any given moment, seeing it as what they deserved in a life that has cut them no breaks.
In Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver provides readers a clear-eyed yet sympathetic portrait of rural America. Communities gutted by job losses and cajoled by drug companies into burying their frustration and disappointment in painkillers, struggling to keep and get by on what little they have left. An eye-opening and disturbing revelation for those readers on the other side of the resulting social and political chasm. Giving Demon the last word for his world:
If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight. (103)
Other notes and information:
This book is one of three that journalist Nicholas Kristof recommended in an article entitled Join My Bewildered Liberals Book Club.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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