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Critic’s Notebook
‘James,’ ‘Demon Copperhead’ and the Triumph of Literary Fan Fiction
How Percival Everett and Barbara Kingsolver reimagined classic works by Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
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By A.O. Scott
One of the most talked-about novels of the year so far is “ James ,” by Percival Everett. Last year, everyone seemed to be buzzing about Barbara Kingsolver’s “ Demon Copperhead ,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction . These are very different books with one big thing in common: Each reimagines a beloved 19th-century masterwork, a coming-of-age story that had been a staple of youthful reading for generations.
“Demon Copperhead” takes “David Copperfield,” Charles Dickens’s 1850 chronicle of a young boy’s adventures amid the cruelty and poverty of Victorian England, and transplants it to the rocky soil of modern Appalachia, where poverty and cruelty continue to flourish, along with opioids, environmental degradation and corruption. “James” retells Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” first published in 1884, from the point of view of Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim — now James.
The rewriting of old books is hardly a new practice, though it’s one that critics often like to complain about. Doesn’t anyone have an original idea ? Can’t we just leave the classics alone?
Of course not. Without imitation, our literature would be threadbare. The modern canon is unimaginable without such acts of appropriation as James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which deposited the “Odyssey” in 1904 Dublin, and Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea,” an audacious postcolonial prequel to “Jane Eyre.” More recently, Zadie Smith refashioned E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” into “ On Beauty ” and tackled Dickens in “ The Fraud, ” while Kamel Daoud answered Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” with “ The Meursault Investigation .”
Shakespeare ransacked Holinshed’s “Chronicles” for his histories and whatever Latin and Italian plays he could grab hold of for his comedies and tragedies. A great many of those would be ripped off, too — reinvented, transposed, updated — by ambitious artists of later generations. Tom Stoppard and John Updike twisted “Hamlet” into “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “Gertrude and Claudius.” “Romeo and Juliet” blossomed into “West Side Story.” The best modern versions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” are samurai movies directed by Akira Kurosawa .
As for Dickens and Twain, it’s hard to think of two more energetic self-imitators. Their collected writings are thick with sequels, reboots and spinoffs. Literary brands in their own right, they were among the most successful IP-driven franchise entertainers of their respective generations, belonging as much to popular culture as to the world of letters.
“David Copperfield,” drawing on incidents in Dickens’s early life and coming in the wake of blockbusters like “The Pickwick Papers” and “Oliver Twist,” functions as an autobiographical superhero origin story. David, emerging from a childhood that is the definition of “Dickensian,” discovers his powers as a writer and ascends toward the celebrity his creator enjoyed.
Twain was already famous when he published “Huckleberry Finn,” which revived the characters and setting of an earlier success. The very first sentence gestures toward a larger novelistic universe: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter.” (Classic sequelism: a welcome back to the established fans while ushering in the newbies.) Tom, who very nearly ruins Huck’s book when he shows up at the end, is the heart of the franchise: Tony Stark to Huck’s Ant-Man, the principal hero in an open-ended series of adventures, including a handful that Twain left unfinished .
“James” and “Demon Copperhead,” then, might fairly be described as fan fiction. Not just because of the affection Everett and Kingsolver show for their predecessors — in his acknowledgments, Everett imagines a “long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain” in the afterlife; in hers, Kingsolver refers to Dickens as her “genius friend” — but because of the liberties their love allows them to take. “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” may be especially susceptible to revision because they are both profoundly imperfect books, with flaws that their most devoted readers have not so much overlooked as patiently endured.
I’m not talking primarily about matters of language that scrape against modern sensibilities — about Victorian sexual mores in Dickens or racial slurs in Twain. As the critic and novelist David Gates suggests in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of “David Copperfield,” “sophisticated readers correct for the merely antiquated.” I’m referring to failures of stylistic and narrative quality control.
As Gates puts it, Dickens’s novel “goes squishy and unctuous” when he “stops following his storytelling instincts and starts listening to extra-literary imperatives.” Preachiness and piety are his most evident vices. Twain’s much noted misjudgment goes in other directions, as he abandons the powerful story of Huck and Jim’s friendship — and the ethical awakening at its heart — to revert to strenuous boys-adventure Tom Sawyerism. The half-dozen final chapters postpone Jim’s freedom so that Tom — and possibly Twain as well — can show off his familiarity with the swashbuckling tropes of popular fiction and insulate “Huckleberry Finn” from the charge of taking itself too seriously.
“Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished,” Twain warned in a prefatory note. But “Huckleberry Finn” and “David Copperfield” are both essentially comic — sometimes outright hilarious — novels rooted in hatred of injustice. It’s impossible to tease those impulses apart, or to separate what’s most appealing about the books from what’s frustrating.
That tension, I think, is what opens the door to Kingsolver’s and Everett’s reimaginings. For Kingsolver, “David Copperfield” is an “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.” (“You’d think he was from around here,” her protagonist says when he reads Dickens for the first time.)
One way Kingsolver insulates “Demon Copperhead” from Dickensian sentimentality is by giving her protagonist a voice likely to remind many readers of Huckleberry Finn himself. Huck, after all, is the North American archetype of the resourceful, marginal, backwoods man-child. Though she doesn’t push as far into regional dialect as Twain did, the tang and salt of what used to be called southwestern humor season her pages.
Dialect figures in Dickens and Twain as a mark of authenticity and a source of laughter. In “James,” Everett weaves it into the novel’s critique of power. He replicates Jim’s speech patterns from “Huckleberry Finn,” but here they represent the language enslaved Black characters use in front of white people, part of a performance of servility and simple-mindedness that is vital to surviving in a climate of pervasive racial terror. Among themselves, James and the other slaves are witty and philosophical, attributes that also characterize James’s first-person narration. “Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous,” he muses after he has been conscripted into a traveling minstrel show. “And I had spent my life as a slave.”
In “Huckleberry Finn,” Jim is Huck’s traveling companion and protector, the butt of his pranks and the agent of his redemption. Early in their journey downriver, Huck is stricken with guilt at the “sin” of helping Jim escape. His gradual understanding of the error of this thinking — of the essential corruption of a society built on human chattel — is the narrative heart of Twain’s book. Against what he has been taught, against the precepts of the “sivilized” world, he comes to see Jim as a person.
For Everett’s James, his own humanity is not in doubt, but under perpetual assault. His relationship with Huck takes on a new complexity. How far can he trust this outcast white boy? How much should he risk in caring for him? To answer those questions would be to spoil some of Everett’s boldest and most brilliant twists on Twain’s tale.
Which, in Everett’s hands, becomes, like “David Copperfield,” the story of a writer. James, who has surreptitiously learned how to read, comes into possession of a pencil stub — a treasure whose acquisition exacts a horrific cost. It represents the freedom of self-representation, the hope, implicitly realized by the novel itself, that James might someday tell his own story.
James’s version is not something Twain could have conceived, but it is nonetheless a latent possibility in the pages of “Huckleberry Finn,” much as the terrible logic of dispossession, addiction and violence in 21st-century America can be read between the lines of Dickens. Everett and Kingsolver are able to see that. This is what originality looks like.
A.O. Scott is a critic at large for The Times’s Book Review, writing about literature and ideas. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. More about A.O. Scott
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‘Demon Copperhead’ Review: A Heart-Wrenching Portrait of the Opioid Crisis
“They did this to you.” Other characters drill this assuration into the mind of Demon, the main character of Barbara Kingsolver’s newest novel, “Demon Copperhead.” The book, set in a poor county in southern Appalachia during the opioid epidemic, deals with the large question of who is to blame for a crisis. Kingsolver uses the perspective of a young boy to showcase the true parties at fault in rural America, including the institutional structures that ruin lives, corrupt children, and send communities into cycles of ruin. Inspired by the sweeping narrative of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield,'' Kingsolver uses compelling characters and an underrepresented setting to create a heart-wrenching portrait of the American opioid crisis.
Demon Copperhead — his first name a twist on “Damon,” his last name owed to the red hair he inherited from his father — has a lot of troubles. From the beginning, though, he takes responsibility for his entire life. The novel starts with the words, “First, I got myself born,” and from there Demon faces a variety of harrowing childhood experiences, including an opioid-addicted mother, an abusive stepfather, intense grief, child labor, and negligent guardianship. The responsibility that he takes for matters outside of his control makes readers immediately sympathetic for Demon. His resilience is repeatedly put on display, even as the mental scars of trauma start to weigh down upon him. Demon briefly rises from his troubles to become a star on his local football team — but this respite is interrupted by a devastating injury. This leads to Demon’s first use of opioids, and then the novel follows the arc of his life after this dreaded introduction.
This novel draws upon both current problems in Appalachia and the way that Dickens brought the lives of the trodden-down into public consciousness. Kingsolver, known for her acclaimed novel “The Poisonwood Bible,” was raised in rural Kentucky. There, she saw the effects of the opioid crisis in Appalachia first-hand. After visiting Charles Dickens’s home in England, Kingsolver was inspired by his “impassioned critique of institutional poverty” and decided to tackle modern American problems in a similar fashion. Her novel is just as eye-opening about the opioid epidemic as Dickens’s stories were for Victorian readers. Kingsolver’s deep admiration for Dickens shines throughout the novel; she refers to him as her “genius friend in the Acknowledgements. Even Demon compliments Dickens directly: “Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”
Kingsolver reflects Dickens in other ways, too: Just as some people turn away from Dickens’s notoriously lengthy tales, the page count of “Demon Copperhead” — nearly 550 pages — has the potential to daunt readers. This is not without reason; books that reach this length often contain tangents that strike fast-paced readers as unnecessary. Sometimes the novel gets stuck in a “rinse and repeat” storyline, in which Demon escapes some form of torturous supervision just to get trapped in another. However, this torrent of misery is an effective way to emphasize the many obstacles that the people of Appalachia faced during the opioid crisis: a never-ending stream of misfortune that seemed inescapable.
The novel focuses on Demon, but it also features the strong women who shape his life. Although his mother’s addiction negatively impacts Demon, her love always stays with him. Other female influences in his life include Mrs. Peggot, his elderly neighbor who helps care for him when his mother is distracted, and June, another Peggot relative that becomes a guiding light in Demon’s life after he tunnels into addiction. Kingsolver crafts the Peggot women as the embodiment of resilience and kindness amidst the crisis. There are more amazing female characters, but the one that shines is Angus, Demon’s foster sister. Angus defies expectations of both Applachian and female stereotypes, and is one of the only characters that truly recognizes how much Demon has gone through. Kingsolver’s strong female characters show the especially intense struggles that women underwent during the opioid crisis — forced to face the dangers of addiction while often being put into roles in which they had to care for others.
The novel also stands against stereotypes of rural Americans — Demon often remarks that city people don’t understand Appalachian life. He begins to see how his county has been systematically ignored throughout the crisis and the way that opioids were peddled recklessly to vulnerable community members. Demon is able to survive the institutions that worked against him — but he also acknowledges that so many lives were not adequately protected. Kingsolver reveals the humanity behind the numbers of the crisis and the stereotypes that prevented help from coming to the places that needed it the most.
Overall, the novel has the potential to open the eyes of many Americans that have been sheltered from the opioid crisis, whether they were oblivious to its toll on rural areas or are too young to remember its significance and the scars that it has inflicted on some of our country’s most defenseless groups. The dreary subject matter will not be for everyone, and those afraid of lengthy novels may be intimidated, but “Demon Copperhead” is an odyssey not to miss. It highlights the resilience and strength that can grow from some of the world’s darkest places, and reminds us not to ignore and belittle those who have grown up in a world that works against them.
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How Charles Dickens Compelled an Author to Write the New David Copperfield .
Barbara kingsolver says the victorian author came to her while she was at his home and urged her to tell the real story of appalachia in demon copperhead ..
Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, Emily Bazelon, David Plotz, and John Dickerson spoke with author Barbara Kingsolver about how Charles Dickens came to her before she wrote her new novel, Demon Copperhead .
This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Emily Bazelon: Demon Copperhead is a recasting of David Copperfield , the classic novel by Charles Dickens. And Barbara, you’re following the path that Dickens laid out to tell the story in his time of a boy growing up in 19 th -century England, and you are telling the story of a boy growing up in our times in Appalachia. I’ve wanted to ask you for so long, why Dickens as your source of inspiration? I especially want to know this now because I was reading a recent essay in the New Yorker by Zadie Smith, and she was disparaging Dickens as being too sentimental, too theatrical, too moralistic, and too controlling. And it just made me so curious because you have sought him out as a source of material and inspiration. Why is that?
Barbara Kingsolver: He showed me the way into a story that I had found impossible to write for several years. I spent close to three years absolutely sure that I wanted to tell the story of what’s happening to my community, our communities, here in Appalachia as a result of the opioid epidemic. I wanted to tell the bigger story, sort of the whole historical context of how this region has been exploited by big capital for centuries, and how that has shaped the identity of this region and how it has created institutional poverty here. It has suppressed our culture of education. It has done all kinds of things that we Appalachians get blamed for.
I think that outsiders look at this region as backward, this whole hillbilly stereotype of these shiftless people who lack the ambition to get a proper education and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, et cetera. These are my people. I’m Appalachian; that’s my identity. This is home. This is the place and these are the people that I love who make me who I am, who make me happy to be alive.
The story I wanted to tell was about the orphans—really literally the orphans of the epidemic, of whom we have an entire generation here coming up through our school system—how little is being done for them and how these are the throwaway kids of a very wealthy society. Who wants to hear that story? I just really felt blocked. I couldn’t find a way in.
And then through a very strange circumstance, I had a visit from Dickens, this sort of ethereal visit in his house in Broadstairs, and he told me to tell this story. He said, “Look, nobody in my time wanted to hear about these orphans either, and I made them listen.” I sat up and took note. And what he told me is, “Point of view is your tool. Let the child tell the story.” And I started writing it that night on his desk, the desk in his house at Broadstairs where he wrote David Copperfield .
Listen, OK, Zadie Smith has her opinion about this guy who is too sentimental, too moralistic, too uncool, and that is all fine and good. I love Zadie Smith and I think she does great work. But let me also tell you that when Dickens wrote his novels about structural poverty and orphans and these stories nobody wanted to hear, they were lined up on the docks to get the next installment of the story when they were delivered by ship.
So, I think the bottom line here is a crackerjack plot, really great characters, and point of view. Let the kid tell the story. I needed to make this a galloping tale. I needed to make it funny, memorable, fast-paced, all of those things, and use the tools that Dickens gave us to make this a story that people would read. That gave me confidence. And I’ll also say that my story is substantially less sentimental than David Copperfield . David Copperfield, bless his heart, is this wide-eyed, this kind of starry-eyed kid, who says, “Wow, mommy has a new boyfriend. Hope he’ll be nice.” Well, my David Copperfield, my Demon, he’s on to this guy. The day he moves in, Demon says, “Nope, this is not going to be good news.” So, he is just a lot more savvy. He’s a 20 th -century and 21 st -century kid. He can’t be as naïve. Not that any kid now can be quite that naïve, but especially one who’s been basically taking care of his own mother since he was out of diapers.
David Plotz: That was such an inspiring answer, Barbara. As a child, my father read David Copperfield to me, and so I’m acutely aware of how vivid the dialogue is in that book. I think what’s incredible, my girlfriend was just listening to Demon Copperhead as an audiobook, and you’ve done an amazing job in capturing the voices of the people you’re writing about. I just am interested in what your process was to do that? How did you channel that language and kind of invent this—I mean, I guess you didn’t fully invent, but there was some act of creation of this voice of Demon, which is amazing voice.
This is my native language. I grew up listening to Appalachian talk. What you’re hearing from me right now isn’t exactly Appalachian vernacular. I code-switch, and I learned very soon after I moved from Appalachia that if I talk the way I grew up talking, people would have their opinions of who I am. And I gradually developed another sort of affect that I present to the outer world so that people would stop making fun of the way I pronounced words and listen to what I was saying. But I could kind of gradually bring you into those waters, ultimately surround you in the bath of what I think is a beautiful language so that you could appreciate it, but I just didn’t dump you into the deep end of that, well, bathtub, to reuse a very old metaphor.
For example, there are words that are sort of triggers for people’s judgment. The word “holler.” The word “reckon,” I reckon. Which is so interesting, because when British people or Australians say, “I reckon,” that sounds high-class. But when I say it, “I reckon,” you just put the straw hat on me in your mind. So, I could ease you into it.
One thing that I absolutely hate in printed books is what I call “Uncle Remus spelling,” where people use misspelled words to represent vernacular pronunciation. You know what I’m talking about. I hate that because it’s condescending. When we speak, our language here is—obviously there is substandard speech, but it isn’t wrong to say, “I reckon he’s gone up there in the holler.” There’s nothing wrong with that. So, I’m not going to misspell things and suggest otherwise. But I will tell you, the first draft, I got about 200 pages in, and then just for curiosity I did a search: “How many times has Demon dropped the F-bomb in the first 200 pages?” And the answer was like 175 times. It was probably too much. And other things. His anger toward outsiders, judgment of his people, all of these things were too ratcheted up in the beginning. So, I had to really think about, through draft after draft after draft—because that’s the way I work—really shaping that voice. I really want you to want to adopt this kid, to get you on his side. And then by the end, I think you’re probably just as mad as he is at the way our country has failed him. And that’s the goal.
But it’s just, how do you do it? You just do it. That’s the work. That’s what I do at this desk every day is work and work and work and redraft until the voice just is as clear on the page as it is the way I hear it in my head.
clock This article was published more than 2 years ago
Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’ may be the best novel of 2022
It’s barely Halloween. The ball won’t drop in Times Square for another two full months, and more good books will surely appear before the year ends. But I already know: My favorite novel of 2022 is Barbara Kingsolver’s “ Demon Copperhead .”
Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love. Damon is the only child of a teenage alcoholic — “an expert at rehab” — in southwest Virginia. He becomes aware of his status early, around the same time he gets the nickname Demon. “I was a lowlife,” he says, “born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.” The more he grasps the connotations of words like “hick” and “redneck,” the more discouraged he becomes. “This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes. … We can actually hear you.”
Now, we can hear him.
“You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you’re worthless,” he says. “Mainly by getting there first yourself.”
Demon is right about America’s condescending derision, but he’s wrong about his own worth. In a feat of literary alchemy, Kingsolver uses the fire of that boy’s spirit to illuminate — and singe — the darkest recesses of our country.
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The essential Americanness of “Demon Copperhead” feels particularly ironic given that Kingsolver has drawn her inspiration directly from one of England’s most celebrated classics: “ David Copperfield ,” by Charles Dickens. In a brief afterword, Kingsolver expresses her gratitude to Dickens and acknowledges living for years “with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy.”
Indeed, anyone familiar with Dickens’s most autobiographical novel will hear its characters and incidents echoing through these chapters. And in one particularly meta-moment, Kingsolver winks at her readers when Demon praises an author he discovered in school. Charles Dickens, he says, is “one seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”
There’s no denying the pleasure of seeing Dickens’s Peggottys transformed into the kindly Peggots, or his oily villain Uriah Heep recast as a sniveling assistant football coach named U-Haul Pyles. But too much can be made of these echoes. Kingsolver hasn’t merely reclothed Dickens’s characters in modern dress and resettled them in southern Appalachia, the way some desperate Shakespeare director might reimagine “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” taking place in an Ikea. No, Kingsolver has reconceived the story in the fabric of contemporary life. “Demon Copperhead” is entirely her own thrilling story, a fierce examination of contemporary poverty and drug addiction tucked away in the richest country on Earth.
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From the moment Demon starts talking to us, his story is already a boulder rolling down the Appalachian Mountains, faster and faster, stopping for nothing. “We’re one damn thing after another,” he says. “Sometimes a good day lasts all of about ten seconds.” Even before he’s born, his father, a man named Copperhead, has died under mysterious circumstances. Demon knows that his mother, bubbling with optimism and other spirits, is not to be counted on, but it’s still a shock when he loses her, too, and gets dropped into the gears of the foster-care system.
“I thought my life couldn’t get any worse,” he says. “Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.” He’s 10 years old.
Kingsolver has effectively reignited the moral indignation of the great Victorian novelist to dramatize the horrors of child poverty in the late 20th century. Demon’s descriptions of his life under the neglectful eye of Child Protective Services reveal one ordeal after another. Woefully overwhelmed, the state relies on placement companies, “rotating and merchandising foster boys at more than fifty customer accounts.” It’s a ghastly racket, akin to modern-day slavery, with shady foster parents signing on for the free labor and the state’s monthly checks. “Being big for your age is a trap,” Demon notes. “They send you to wherever they need a grown-up body that can’t fight back.” At its best, foster care is “like a cross between prison and dodgeball.”
And there’s the saving grace. This would be a grim melodrama if it weren’t for Demon’s endearing humor, an alloy formed by his unaffected innocence and weary cynicism. Assigned to a tobacco farm, for instance, Demon meets his new foster “dad,” Crickson, “a big, meaty guy with a red face and a greasy comb-over like fingers palming a basketball.” The derelict kitchen is covered with scum. “This man’s wife had passed away,” Demon says. “I wondered if her body was still lying somewhere back in that house, because I’d say there’d been zero tidying up around here since she kicked off.”
In such moments — and they’re everywhere in this novel — you may be reminded of another orphaned boy slipping through the country’s underbrush, just trying to stay out of trouble: Huck Finn. With Demon, Kingsolver has created an outcast equally reminiscent of Twain’s masterpiece, speaking in the natural poetry of the American vernacular.
Kingsolver’s attraction to the great 19th-century novels is not surprising. Since publishing her first novel, “ The Bean Trees ,” in 1988, she’s grown increasingly interested in stories that explore exigent social themes. In 2000, she established the Bellwether Prize, a $25,000 award designed to celebrate “socially engaged fiction” that addresses “issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships.”
That’s a tall order, fraught with the deadening risks of polemical art, and none of the prize winners I’ve read has reached anything close to Kingsolver’s combination of subtlety and power. Now, with “Demon Copperhead,” she’s raised the bar even higher, providing her best demonstration yet of a novel’s ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform.
Much of that success stems from how cleverly Demon’s experience is woven through the tragedy of opioid addiction in the United States. This boy grows up in the early days of that miracle pill, OxyContin, and Kingsolver illustrates how a conspiracy of capitalism and criminality preyed on the pain of poor Americans to create a shockingly profitable and deadly industry.
“I don’t know a single person my age that’s not taking pills,” Demon says at one point. “If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help.” But these words, laid out in the achingly candid voice of a young man who barely survives, create a visceral picture of that dragon.
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“Where does the road to ruin start?” Demon asks. “That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made.” But part of his struggle involves realizing how much of this road has been laid by forces entirely outside his control. At one point, a kind woman tells Demon that he mustn’t think he has to be responsible for everything. His job, she insists, is “just to be a little boy.”
“Weird,” Demon thinks. “I’d not had that job before.”
In such tender moments, this story feels almost too much to bear.
Demon survives. On some level, we always know that; he’s the narrator, after all. But the harrowing story Kingsolver tells — including a particularly frightening climax — makes his life seem continually in peril. His resilience, in the face of so many personal tragedies and governmental failures, makes him a name to remember.
“I was starting to get known as Demon Copperhead,” he says in a rare moment of pride. “You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it.”
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
Demon Copperhead
By Barbara Kingsolver
Harper. 548 pp. $32.50
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