I’ve read a few of Barbara Kingsolver’s books before this one, and while I can’t argue she’s a good writer, I haven’t loved her writing. I mostly finish her books with a shrug and a, “That was fine.” Although even as I write this I realize there are specific things in her books that have stayed with me for years and years (in some cases, decades). She knows which details to focus on that bring out the larger themes she’s trying to convey.
All this is to say that, when I first heard she had a new book out, I didn’t exactly run out to grab a copy until I had heard it was one of the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prize. Then I did go to my library app to request the audiobook (which took forever because I’m sure everyone else did the same thing).
I loved it!
I don’t know if there’s something about this book that resonated with me more than her other work, or if it’s just that her writing is better on audio than on the page. The narrator certainly did a great job, so I absolutely recommend checking this one out on audio if you’re into audiobooks.
I knew going in that this was Kingsolver’s retelling of David Copperfield, which I’ve never read. I did recently watch the adaptation starring Dev Patel that came out a few years ago, so I knew the beats, and I knew what to expect. Although that adaptation doesn’t have such a miserable ending for David’s fiancée. Knowing Dickens, I wouldn’t be surprised if his ending for that character was more in line with Kingsolver’s ending for her.
So instead of David Copperfield in 19th-century London, we have Damon “Demon” Copperhead in Virginia at the turn of the 21st century right as oxycontin is taking off. If you know anything about Purdue Pharma targeting rural areas like Virginia because they were full of people who made a living through physical labor, were more likely to be injured and less likely to be able to take time off to heal, you know what’s coming.
Demon’s dad drowns before Demon is ever born, and his mom does her best, but she’s already a drug addict, and staying clean is easier said than done. She finally does manage to get clean, but only for a few years before a coworker gives her oxy, thinking it’s safe because that’s what the drug companies said. So she died and Demon ended up in the foster system, which, depending on where you end up, can be a lot like the workhouses of Victorian England.
I understand that Demon had to grow up fast because of what he went through, but I still found it hard to remember that he wasn’t even a teenager yet in the chapters after his mom died. It might have been at least in part because the narrator is a full-grown man, but I also think the way he talked and the things he talked about sounded more like the stuff you hear from a teenager than a pre-teen boy.
That’s really my only complaint about this book. For the most part it completely sucked me in and I kept rooting for Demon and for things to go well for him, even though I knew things had to keep taking a turn for the worse almost right up until the very end.
Speaking of which, this book doesn’t really have a happily-ever-after-type ending. It’s more that it ends in a moment when Demon is happy, and there’s the potential for him to continue to be happy, so of course we want to think that’s how he ends up. But the book had plenty of other sections when he was happy and things never stayed that way. It’s really true to life that way. It has its ups and downs and is never all good or all bad.
Despite that fact, Demon tends to focus on the bad. I’m not trying to belittle the trauma he went through, but I do think it’s interesting that, despite experiencing both good and bad times throughout his childhood, it seems like he generally treats the good times as brief reprises between the bad times instead of the other way around.
I also appreciate that Angus just kept telling him to ride the ups and downs of life. She’s about his age (maybe a few years older), but has a better grasp of the sense that life is never just one thing. And this is coming from a girl whose mother died and then her dad checked out, so her life hasn’t been a cakewalk either, even if she hasn’t had the financial struggles Demon had.
Like David Copperfield, this book is told completely in the first person, and I kept expecting it to end with Demon having written his autobiography. Instead, by the end of the book, Demon is working on a graphic novel, but it’s not an autobiography. It’s more of a history of Hillbilly’s and how they got to be towards the bottom of the country’s shit pile.
By the way, there is a really interesting section at the end where they talk about the division between a land economy and a money economy and how that goes all the way back to the early days of the U.S. It made me think of the ongoing fight between Jefferson and Hamilton as basically being about land economy vs money economy, and that realization kind of blew my mind.