Demon Copperhead in Reading with Style

Mar 05, 2023 Bucket rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary, parents-affecting-children, culture, reviewed, life-and-death, love, bildungsroman, american-dream, class

This is a great and well-written novel, with fantastic characters. It's also an honest, close analysis of the economic and social issues the U.S. created in coal country by making sure residents could do nothing else with their lives for decades. Kingsolver dies deep into broken families, opioid and meth addictions, no jobs, terrible schools, and the near impossibility of overcoming these odds. Most can't.

On top of that, it's a retelling of David Copperfield that follows Dickens' masterpiece alm This is a great and well-written novel, with fantastic characters. It's also an honest, close analysis of the economic and social issues the U.S. created in coal country by making sure residents could do nothing else with their lives for decades. Kingsolver dies deep into broken families, opioid and meth addictions, no jobs, terrible schools, and the near impossibility of overcoming these odds. Most can't.

On top of that, it's a retelling of David Copperfield that follows Dickens' masterpiece almost plot point by plot point. Kingsolver opens with this quote from David Copperfield: "It's in vain to recall the past unless it works some influence on the present." She definitely put her money where her mouth is.

Almost every scene here is straight from Dickens, but modernized in ways both obvious and subtle. I was most impressed with how Kingsolver's characters have very different motives from Dickens' but their actions and outcomes are the same and somehow ring even more true. She takes David, who Dickens treated with too much sympathy, and creates Damon/Demon whose real flaws and failures shine through. She takes Dora, a lazy princess type, and creates Dory, strung-out and so struck by grief that she never could grow up. She takes Agnes, who is pure and full of moral strength but basically a timid doormat, and creates Angus, also full of moral strength but also ambition, sarcasm, intelligence and passion. As Demon says of Angus, "She was not in the business of throwing her life away so other people can stay shitfaced."

There are moments throughout when Kingsolver subtly reminds us she's telling an old story through Demon's thoughts, like "Here all we can be is everything we've been" and "A good story doesn't just copy life. It pushes back on it."

This was especially interesting to me in how Kingsolver morphs the heart of Dickens' novel. In David Copperfield, David's eyes are opened when he hears the reflections of Annie Strong who gave up her young lover to marry an older man. She says she's grateful to her husband that she avoided "the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart." David realizes that his marriage to Dora is just such a mistake. Annie also says that "there can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose" which stabs David through the heart. He realizes he made a mistake, but it's too late and he can only make the best of life with Dora.

In Demon Copperhead, these revelations come from Ms. Annie, a white art teacher who is married to a black literature teacher. Their relationship is seen as suspicious just like Annie Strong's. Ms. Annie says that "Love has to come from a strong place. Not just grabbing whatever's in reach." and "One other person can go a long way towards making your world right... But the support has to run both ways." She stabs Demon through the heart too and his continuing care for a constantly near-overdose Dory mirrors David's life.

But what's interesting to me is that in Kingsolver's novel, this isn't the heart anymore. She has rebalanced and recalibrated everything to what matters in modern life. Because in the modern world, Angus (unlike Agnes) isn't doomed to stay forever a child if she doesn't marry and Demon has addiction to deal with instead of the lack-of-household-structure that is Dora's big downfall.

We still read classics for a reason - their universal themes that stand the test of time. I really enjoyed how Kingsolver took the frame of what makes David Copperfield still matter and built a whole new structure of feeling and detail. It was a wonderful reading experience for me, and would be just as good for someone who hasn't read David Copperfield. ...more

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