The words signal Kingsolver’s avowedly political intent as an author – one that smothered the creativity of her last novel, 2018’s Unsheltered, but is for the most part more subtly integrated here despite the book’s long list of righteous campaigns. That novel provides her epigraph: “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale – Dickensian, you might say, and Kingsolver does indeed describe Demon Copperhead as a contemporary adaptation of David Copperfield. He becomes a star player, but his tale’s linguistic dynamism is up against the dogged fatalism of its plot, and when he’s injured in a game and the pain pills are doled out, a sorry outcome surely looms. Demon will need every lungful of green air that he can get because a thug of a stepfather is about to overturn his world, and a stolen Ox圜ontin prescription will knock his mother off the wagon soon after.ĭire experiences in the “foster factory” follow, compelling Demon to track down a long-lost grandmother who persuades the local high-school football coach to take him in. They’re ragged, hungry kids for whom Bible stories are as fanciful as superhero comics, so nature provides just about the only salvation going, despite rumours of venomous copperhead snakes locally. Her boy hero spends his earliest days inseparable from his best friend, “Maggot”, playing in the woods and messing around in creeks lined with mud “that made you feel rich – leaf smelling, thick, of a colour that you wanted to eat”.
With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale It’s an intensely personal mission for Kingsolver, who grew up in Kentucky versed in a language that, as she puts it in her acknowledgments, “my years outside of Appalachia tried to shame from my tongue”.
“You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it,” he observes, and so does his voice, summoning in its singularity the likes of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield while hailing from a very different demographic.įor this is a novel that testifies to the experience of some of the earliest casualties of the opioid crisis, in particular the hollowed-out communities of Appalachian America, who tend to feature in the wider culture solely as the butt of jokes – they’re moonshiners, hicks, rednecks. He grows into a wild boy with red hair inherited from the dead father he never knew, and before long the nickname “Demon Copperhead” has stuck.
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