Demon Copperhead, the protagonist of this eponymously titled novel, is born in trailer house in Lee County in the southern mountains of Appalachia to a teenaged mother with substance abuse issues. To tone down her labor pains, she overdoses as her son comes into the world. Over several years, Damon (AKA Demon) goes from having little to having less. His Melungeon father has already died an accidental death at the Devil’s Bathtub. His mother, a foster child herself, lacks the financial or emotional means to care for her child. She eventually marries an abusive husband and, as a consequence of the abuse, overdoses again. Eventually, after one final OD, his mother dies. He goes from having the sole solace of actually having a mother—albeit a poor one—to being an orphan and, as an older child, one a more difficult to place for adoption. Demon is placed in a series of foster homes that go from bad to worse. In one, he is treated like a slave by a tobacco farmer, underfed and overworked. He goes from being an honor roll student to barely passing as he spends autumn months harvesting tobacco. He finally runs away, seeking his paternal grandmother who sets him up to foster in a football coach’s house. When he is injured, he is prescribed Oxycontin and follows in his mother’s footsteps with addiction.
This Pulitzer Prize winning novel takes on a lot of complex social issues: the abysmal care America provides under the foster care system; domestic and child abuse; drug abuse; big Pharma and Oxycontin; and the contrast between the haves and the have nots in the world. The characters are complex and fully developed, appealing, but often not terribly nice and even more frequently self-sabotaging. In this purported retelling of Dicken’s David Copperfield, Kingsolver fully captures a young man’s voice, somewhat akin to that of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. Demon is strong, resilient, and has occasional insights that are far too old for his chronological age. I felt such strong empathy for poor Demon that I had trouble putting the book down to go to sleep. A wonder of a book.
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Demon Copperhead(Harper, October 18, 2022) is available through:
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