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.
