Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
Summary
Damon Fields, called Demon for his red hair, is born on the floor of a single wide trailer in Lee County, Virginia, to a teenage mother who does not survive his childhood. What follows is foster care, farm labour, a tobacco crop, a football career that ends in an injury, and the OxyContin prescribed for it.
Kingsolver has taken the plot of David Copperfield and moved it to southern Appalachia during the opioid epidemic, and the fit is exact. Dickens wrote about children discarded by an economy that had no use for them, and Kingsolver argues that the same thing happened again in the same way, to the same kind of children, within living memory. Every major Dickens character has a counterpart, and readers who know the original will spot them; readers who do not will lose nothing.
Demon narrates it himself, funny and furious, with a running argument about how his region is portrayed by people who have never been there. He draws comics, and the superhero he invents for himself is the closest thing he gets to a way out that nobody can take away.
The people who help him are as vivid as the ones who do not. Angus, the coach's daughter, is the great friend of the book, and a science teacher called Mr Armstrong keeps insisting that what happened to the county was done to it deliberately, by companies that came for the coal and left.
It is long, roughly five hundred and fifty pages, and the middle section during his addiction is genuinely hard going. It is also compulsively readable and unusually angry for a book this warm. Best for readers who want a state of the nation novel that is also, page by page, a pleasure.
Historical Context & Significance
Demon Copperhead shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Hernan Diaz's Trust, the first split in the category's history. It took the Women's Prize for Fiction five weeks later, making it one of the very few novels to take a major American and a major British prize in a single season.
Barbara Kingsolver had won the Women's Prize once before, for The Lacuna in 2010, and this was her second Pulitzer nomination and first win.
She lives in the Appalachian region the novel describes and has said the idea came to her one night in Dickens's former home in Broadstairs, Kent, where she started writing at his desk, having decided that the book needed his structure rather than her own. Its treatment of the opioid crisis put it alongside the nonfiction accounts of Purdue Pharma appearing at the same time.