Charles Dickens

Review: Demon Copperhead

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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.

Review: The Gospel in Dickens

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The Gospel in Dickens, Charles Dickens (edited by Gina Dalfonzo, foreword by Karen Swallow Prior). Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2020.

Summary: A collection of excerpts from the works of Charles Dickens showing the Christian gospel themes evident throughout these works.

Many who have read or are familiar the stories and life of Dickens might think him hostile to religious faith. His personal life was not always exemplary, particular his relations with his wife, with whom he separated to pursue his affair with actress Ellen Ternan. Often his portrayals of religious figures are sharply barbed as with Mr. Bumble the beadle in Oliver Twist. In this book, Gina Dalfonzo proposes that what Dickens despised was not Christian faith, but the hypocrisy of some of its leading figures.

Like other books in Plough’s “The Gospel in…” series, this consists of excerpts of a number of his major works organized around three main themes: Sin and Its Victims, Repentance and Grace, and The Righteous Life. Dalfonzo offers an introduction to the work of Dickens seen from a Christian perspective, and concludes with two letters that evidence his personal warm sentiments toward a morally Christian life, one to his son, “Plorn” and the other, written on the next to the last day of his life.

In “Sin and Its Victims” we have the familiar scene from Oliver Twist “I Want Some More” and one I had not read before from Bleak House that was quite striking under the title “He Who is Without Sin” in which a godmother raising an illegitimate child bore a grudge against the mother until struck down with a stroke on hearing the story read from the gospels of the woman caught in adultery and Jesus response to her accusers: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ So many of these are warnings against the ways we may be blind to our own sin.

“Repentance and Grace” consists of excerpts that reflect the theme of awakening to one’s sin, the harms one has caused and in some cases finding grace to begin again. One of the most famous is the awakening of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations to the deleterious effects of training Estella not to love, when she sees the hurt Estella inflicts upon Pip. Her cry, “What have I done?” reveals her remorse, and leads to a new resolve to help Pip. A short passage from Little Dorrit between Mrs Clennam who set herself to combat evil in all its forms mercilessly, and Little Dorrit, contrasts wrathful lawkeeping and the gospel of grace. Little Dorrit replies:

“O Mrs Clennam, Mrs. Clennam. . . angry feelings and unforgiving deeds are no comfort and no guide to you and me. My life has been passed in this poor prison, and my teaching has been very defective; but let me implore you to remember later and better days. Be guided by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the friend of all who were afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion for our infirmities. We cannot but be right if we put all the rest away, and do everything in remembrance of Him. There is no vengeance and no infliction of suffering in his life, I am sure. There can be no confusion in following Him, and seeking for no other footsteps, I am certain.

The third part portrays “The Righteous Life.” Sometimes we see the beauty of a life lived under grace as in “Little Mother” from Little Dorrit in the ways Amy Dorrit cares for and advocates for Maggy, a brain-damaged young woman. There is the attractive character of Septimus Crisparkle in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, at one a proponent of “muscular Christianity” and yet solicitous toward his mother and kind toward all he meets. This section concludes with the speech of Sydney Carton at the end of A Tale of Two Cities and the transformed Ebenezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol.

Short introductions set each excerpt (and there are many more than mentioned here) in context, although at times with works of Dickens I had not read, I felt I did not have enough context. Still, Dalfonzo’s exploration reminded me of the times of delight in reading him and whet my appetite for “more.” I read this in conjunction with a book “weed out” and set aside several volumes of Dickens I’d not read. It’s been a half dozen years or more since my last Dickens. Dalfonzo persuaded me that for reasons of both delight and spiritual edification, it was time to return to “our mutual friend.”

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. The opinions I have expressed are my own.