Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver was our book club book for the month. Clocking it at over 500 pages, we gave ourselves seven weeks to read this one.

From the beginning, this book had a voice. Consider the first paragraph:

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much; the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it. (page 1)

The perspective is of the eponymous Demon Copperhead, a boy born into poverty to a dead father and absentee mother in rural West Virginia. Soon he is orphaned and we follow his progress as he becomes a young man. This is Kingsolver's retelling of David Copperfield and it follows Dickens' book plot point for plot point, but does it in a magical way, really focusing in on the modern equivalents for poor children. 

There's a lot to admire about this book. The voice is lyrical and it's interesting to see how Demon's voice changes as he gets older. Like Babel and Cloud Cuckoo Land, this is another book in which the scope of the topics presented and the amount of research that must have gone into the writing is immense and somewhat overwhelming. From the realities of foster care, living in poverty, homelessness, drug addiction and rehab to even the slang and lexicon used, this book is sheer perfection. 

But it's heavy to read. Only about half the members of our book club read the whole thing because it's just not a great read if you want to escape the realities of a very hard world. I also found the first half of the book rather triggering, what with constant descriptions of rural poverty, child hunger, and checked out parents. 

(I also found the last fifty pages to be stretched out and interminable. But your mileage may vary on that.)

Should you read this? I don't know. It's not easy, but it's important. I felt like reading this in conjunction with Empire of Pain was really helpful to getting the full impact of Kingsolver's research. If I were in a book club that read serious books, I think reading these two books back to back would be a great idea. If you're up for a hard look at the structural issues that have brought rural America to its knees, I would recommend it. If you're looking for something a little less scary and sad, maybe just reread Love Lettering?

4/5 stars (I admired this A LOT and the writing was gorgeous, but I am not going to recommend this widely and the ending was pretty drawn out, so I think of this as a 4 star, but I can see why it's getting as much acclaim as it is.)

Lines of note:

A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. (page 7)

Being a child really was terrible in so many ways. I would never go back to it again.

If you are one of the few that still hasn't been, let me tell you what a city is. A hot mess not easily escaped. (page 22)

We spent a lot of time talking about how so many young people we know who live in rural areas of Wisconsin have never been to Madison or Milwaukee. It's hard for them to see city life as real life in many ways.

Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending u the Batman signal. (page 138)

This was such an interesting way that Kingsolver wrote about the scales falling off Demon's eyes as he grew up and faced one disappointment after another. Really smart writing, but keeping it in a consistent tone and voice.

It was one of your April days where you can smell the plowed fields and see the mountains greening up, like it's the world saying, Hey everybody, I'm not dead yet! (page 161)

Spring will come!

But hard work? Let me tell you what that is: trying to get through every day without the gangling ugly menace of you being stared at, shamed by a teacher, laughed at by girls, or sucker punched. (page 167)

It's so hard to think about what kids are going through when we send them to school to learn. It's not always easy to focus on solving quadratic equations when a child is hungry, upset about abuse at home, suffering mental illness, worried about the health of a family member or friend, or any number of other important things that could impact their learning ability.

His only advice was to be careful in Unicoi because there were folks down there mean enough to hang an elephant. I said okay, thinking it was an expression his people had. But no. They gave the death penalty to an elephant there one time. He said if I was ever in a library to look it up, but try not to look at the photos because the sight of an elephant hanging was not an easy thing to forget. It was a circus elephant that got fed up and finally ran off after its drunk trainer whipped and tormented it to the point of going on a rampage, which, I could relate.  (page 189)

A gray cat slunk out from under a big cabinet thing and gave me the evil eye before it oozed along the wall and ran out the door. (page 197)

What an evocative description of a cat. I know this cat, even though I've never met him.

It's safer knowing more about people than they know about you. (page 200)

One of the things that I liked the most about this book was how good Demon was, from the time he was a small child, at assessing people and their strengths and weaknesses and what his own place was in relation to them.

I was inked with the shit-prints of life: thrashings, lies told, days of getting peaced out on weed, months of going hungry. (page 221)

The evocativeness of this sentence. It's just so well done.

Because the attack itself didn't seem quite real. To us, skyscrapers are just TV, so watching two of them fall down, over and over, looked like the same movie effects of any other we'd seen. (page 283)

Right? If you've never seen a building larger than your school, why would this seem like anything other than fiction to you? I know it seems crazy to think that children haven't seen tall buildings to many people, but I know many people who I graduated from high school with who have never left the state of Michigan. They've certainly never seen the likes of LA or NYC.

I tried to explain the whole human-being aspect of everybody needing to dump on somebody. Stepdad smacks mom, mom yells at the kid, kid finds the dog and kicks it. (Not that we had one. I wrecked some havoc on my Transformers though). We're the dog of Ameria. (page 417)

We kept talking about "the dog of America" in our book club. It just kept coming up as a major theme of the book. 

In my first days of knowing Dori, I'd put in so much effort thinking of her around the clock, being amazed, planning how to get with her. I was high on wanting. Now I had her, and all the air hissed out. I was living life as a flat tire. (page 420)

I thought about this passage a lot as I was reading the book. Love as a simile for drug addiction.

"Whatever you love about her, you get to live with. And the other stuff, you live with that too." (page 422)

This is true for any relationship. You love what you love, but no one is perfect and you gotta live with those imperfections, too.

I always forgot that her last name, Amato, was different from his. They were crazy about each other though. (page 431)

Again, Demon just making these super smart observations and I am jealous that he could do that.

People buying apples and green beans usually have some degree of joy in their hearts. (page 513)

I thought about this a lot, too. I guess if you have the resources to spend on buying and preparing fresh produce, you do have a degree of financial privilege and there's an easiness to that life. Is that joy? I don't know. 

That cat! It was definitely playtime for her.

Things I looked up:

Melungeon (page 4 and repeatedly throughout the book) - An ethnicity from the southeastern US who descend from Europeans, Native American, and sub-Saharan Africans brought to America as indentured servants and later as slaves. Historically associated with settlements in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia. 

Vandal Savage comic (page 15) - Supervillain appearing in DC Comics. He is said to be a Cro-Magnon warrior who gained immortality and advanced healing abilities after encountering a strange meteorite during prehistoric times. 

Battle of Blair Mountain (page 279) - In September 1921, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 law enforcement and strikebreakers during the miners' attempt to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields. The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired and the US Army intervened by presidential order. This was the largest labor uprising in US history and the largest armed conflict uprising since the American Civil War. Up to 100 people were killed and many more were arrested. 

sigoggling (page 307) - US, Appalachia, dated - Not built correctly; crooked, skewed, or out of balance

shelly beans (page 516) - Any large bunch bena that is removed from the shell and is good as a dried bean