Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
‘These are Barbara’s people and her very homeland, and in a meticulously constructed social tapestry, she reveals all that has been thrown at them: the cycles of abuse they endure, the raw deal children are handed, the institutional neglect and poverty.’
Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Demon Copperhead, is truly an epic: a stark social commentary on modern America, told through the eyes of its protagonist, Demon, as he struggles through adolescence in his rural hometown. Bravely taking her structure from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Kingsolver examines those same social ills and inequalities that existed in Victorian times, delivering a hard-hitting truth of the continued depredations that capitalism has perpetuated almost 200 years later, and uniting her and Dickens as great social commentators.
Protagonist Demon is born in a trailer park in Appalachia to his single, teen, addict Mother; it is one of the poorest areas in the US, and one which has continually been extracted of its resources, left to ruins, its people caricatured via a harsh and damaging ‘hillbilly’ trope. These are Barbara’s people and her very homeland, and in a meticulously constructed social tapestry, she reveals all that has been thrown at them: the cycles of abuse they endure, the raw deal children are handed, the institutional neglect and poverty. Most poignant of her social commentaries is that of the US opioid crisis; left right and centre, young people are addicts: meth, Fentanyl, OxyContin, you name it, and often at the hands of pharmaceutical conglomerates who faked their research. It truly is an epidemic, and it is shocking to see interwoven into so many character’s lives and fates, knowing this is a reality. America is at war with itself, one character probes, those in power against the rural people, who abide by a different economy and way of living. It’s a story of survival, a recognition of the good folk amongst the bad, and a reckoning with the US itself.
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