Barbara Kingsolver Archives

Remembering a Martyred Saint

I write this on the evening of St. Valentines Day. While we celebrate it as the holiday of romantic love, the day actually marks the martyrdom of the original Saint Valentine in 269 AD. Valentine was kind and he was courageous in testifying to his faith, even in the face of a death sentence. We know little more than that about him.

While imprisoned awaiting death, Valentine wrote notes to encourage his friends, tying them with twine, signing them “from your valentine.” So that’s where the practice of all those “valentines” I had to take and exchange each year at school came from! Seriously, it is an amazing act of selfless kindness for one about to die.

As the story goes, the “valentine” he sent on the day of his death went to a formerly blind girl. A judge in one of his cases gave him a challenge. If his God was so powerful, then ask that God to heal the judge’s blind daughter. Valentine prayed and God healed the girl through him. She lived to see while he died.

Reading fiction is supposed to develop empathy. But empathy is only a feeling if it is not converted to acts of kindness. Of late, our cultural life consists more in threats and harsh words than in kindness. Perhaps it is up to us readers to be the modern Valentines, speaking and acting with kindness in an increasingly coarse world. We may never know those we heal by our kindness. And it could cost us dearly. But if that’s the cost to be kind in a cruel world, I’d choose that in a heartbeat over cold cruelty.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Many of us thought Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead one of the best novels we read, chronicling the deadly opioid epidemic in Appalachia. Kingsolver is an example of turning empathy into action. In “‘Demon Copperhead’ Explored Addiction. Its Profits Built a Recovery House,” we learn Kingsolver has used her royalties from the book to start a center for Appalachian women in recovery.

The empathy evoked from literature often comes from its exploration of suffering. In “Beyond the Cage and Fog,” Mary Grace Mangano explores the contrasting ways Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sylvia Plath addressed mental suffering.

Tove Jansson is best known for the Moomins cartoons. Lauren LeBlanc, in “The Outsider Who Captured American Loneliness” reviews a new book by Jansson, Sun City. The setting of the book is a senior community in St. Petersburg, Florida. It explores the loneliness of many who are elderly in America.

Then there is Ross Douthat. Often, the most interesting reads in The New York Times are the op-eds, and Douthat’s are among those. I appreciate his voice as a person of faith, Now, he has a new book out titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. “Accidental P i lgrim” adapts content from the book to describe Douthat’s own faith journey.

Finally, it is National Library Lovers Month! Of course, isn’t that the case every month for booklovers. Sadly, not all share our library love. Katie McLain Horner offers practical tips for ways we can support our libraries in “How to Stand Up for Your Local Library by Getting Involved.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I’ve learned of so many good books through other readers. There is one who not only introduced me to the writing of William Kent Krueger but also to a book I am reading right now. It is And There Was Light, an interesting title for a memoir by a blind French resistance hero, Jacques Lusseyrand.

A Cargo of Eagles is the last of the Albert Campion books by Margery Allingham. I just began it. Whereas I loved the Brother Cadfael series and was sad to come to the last of the books, I honestly feel more relieved to finish Allingham. Convoluted plots, lots of people to keep track of, and an enigmatic sleuth make her books a challenge. Of the Queens of Crime, I rank Sayers, Christie, and Marsh ahead of her, in that order.

I’ve long wanted to read through my grandmother’s Bible. She was a woman of faith who had a profound influence in my life for the few years I knew her. I now have outlived her but I’m curious what her Bible will tell me about her. It is an old Scofield study Bible in the King James Version with tissue thin pages. I began reading it this week.

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. New York: Harper Collins, 2022.

Summary: An adaptation of the David Copperfield story set in rural western Virginia, centering on a child, Demon Copperfield, raised by a single mom until she dies, the abuses of foster care he suffers, and after a football injury, the black hole of opioid addiction.

I’ll give you my opinion of this book up front. For me, this is one of the best, perhaps the best novel I’ve read this decade. It seems well-warranted that Kingsolver received a Pulitzer Prize for this book as well as its being an Oprah’s Book Club choice in 2022. Kingsolver worked off of good material, adapting Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield to a story about a child in rural western Virginia, raised in the foster system, then succumbing to opioid addiction after a high school football injury.

Demon Copperhead got his name from his father, Damon Copperhead, who died before he was born in a swimming hole accident at the Devil’s Bathtub, a place that will haunt Demon throughout this story. His mother, an alcoholic and drug addict attempts to raise him, complicated by an abusive step-father. During an overdose, Demon gets his first exposure to the foster system, with social workers either blind or indifferent to the abuses of foster care givers in rural Lee County. At his first placement, Creeky’s Farm, he is basically seasonal farm labor, poorly fed and housed–a theme running throughout. Survival involves the other boys with whom he shares this placement. One, who becomes a long-term friend, Tommy, is comforted by comics Demon draws for him that makes him into a super-hero. The other, the oldest, who dominates this group by charisma and force is Fast Forward, high school star quarterback. Others do his bidding, and sometimes bear the brunt of his mistakes. It’s here that Demon is introduced to “pharm parties” and the prevalence of drugs circulating throughout Lee County, drugs that would soon take his mother’s life.

After that the foster world is his life, with no hope of escape. Another placement results in underage work sifting garbage for a storeowner fronting a meth lab. He literally escapes this by running away in search of a grandmother he’s never met in Tennessee, who helps wayward girls and who determines to make an exception and help him both financially and by using connections to find him a placement with Coach Winfield, a high school football coach, back in Lee County.

The grandmother is not the first to notice a resilience in Demon, that he is more than the “trailer trash” he thinks of himself as being. He grew up with the Peggott family including “Aunt June” Peggott, a nurse practitioner with a drop-dead beautiful daughter Emmy. They eventually returns from Nashville to Lee County, where June works as a nurse practitioner, on the front line of a rising opioid epidemic. Coach Winfield offers him the first decent home he has lived in, decent clothes, food, and more. Coach has a daughter, Angus (a play on Agnes, her actual name), who pretends to be a boy when first encountering Demon. She certainly is a maverick among all the girls he’s met, the closest thing to a sister that he has had who can talk with about his life, an utter straight shooter, and a non-conformist in the local culture. He also meets an art teacher, Miss Annie, who encourages his talent, trying to convince Demon that he has something special.

Coach recognizes that Demon has the talent to be a stellar tight end, big and fast with good hands. Eventually he plays on the high school team, becomes a chick magnet, until a knee injury puts an end to all that. Pain-killing drugs prescribed by the team doctor who also runs the town’s “pill mill” turns a boy already introduced to drugs into an opioid addict, sending him into a deep spiral along with his addict girlfriend Dori. June Peggott, who has been crusading against the companies flooding her community with these drugs tries and fails to help. In fact, her own daughter Emmy is swept up in drug trafficking by Fast Forward.

Kingsolver traces the heart-breaking descent of Dori and Demon, dropouts living together on love and drugs, going through a series of jobs lost, and the desperate quest for the next fix. Demon has been a resilient survivor with a gift, but will it be enough? Will those who see what Demon could become be able to help?

Kingsolver offers a compelling commentary on the failings of the foster care system and the tragedy of drug companies who targeted rural communities to make a “killing” by persuading doctors to prescribe their product to all those suffering pain from age, work injuries, or sports, or just the pain of life. From Demon’s mother to friends, Demon sees death all around him. Will this be his end?

But the other side of this story is the fabric of community, the “people capital” of these rural communities, who do the best that people can do. Loyalties–to family, to one’s buddies, like Tommy or the Peggott’s son Maggot, and in Demon’s case, to Dori even as she descends into addiction hell is another part of this story. We meet characters from Aunt June to Angusj to Annie and her husband, who show tough love without becoming co-dependent or enabling.

Finally, in the character and voice of Demon, Kingsolver has given us a narrator whose story is as compelling in a rural American setting as David Copperfield was in the urban poverty of Dickensian England. We hear the combination of self-doubt from all the destructive messages and personal failures, and the determination that burns within, and we keep reading to find out which will win out in the end.