Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead

More than anything else, it’s the voice.

From the very first sentence, we’re drawn into a wryly knowing yet convincingly youthful voice, as brilliantly drawn as those of the bubble-gum-chomping adolescent sisters in her masterful The Poisonwood Bible. (HOW a middle-aged, middle-class female can so utterly inhabit the skin of a teenage boy I do not know.) An updating of David Copperfield, complete with larger-than-life characters — some walk-on roles and a gutsy young hero — this book is fired with Kingsolver’s determine to illuminate rural America’s opioid crisis. It is torched with power.

Of course, it’s also too long. Even gulping it down, whole, on a Greek beach, I was aware that judicious editorial pruning would have improved it. Dickens would have benefited from same himself — and for the same reason: genius is tough to tame. But Demon Copperhead deserves every award going. Not just at the end — sorry, the masterful end — or the culminating scene of drama by the river — but at several points in the book I was just too angry to read on. (I fled to E.F. Bennet’s “Lucia” books, instead, desperate for sane and safe Victoriana.)

Kingsolver’s indictment of the governmental failure, systemic harshness and — above all — corporate greed is just that powerful, and ‘Demon’s’ authorial voice just that compelling. I’ve never read a work so triple-barrelled: breathtakingly original, laugh-out-loud funny and exquisitely angry.

This is not just a great book: it’s an important book. It’s a hymn of love to Kingsolver’s own Appalachia, where 40% of kids are raised by somebody else beyond their parents. The character of Angus is just as sublime as Demon Copperfield himself — their dialogue scintillates like broken glass in a high school parking lot.

From the Guardian interview today:

Part of the block in writing Kingsolver’s Appalachian novel, she realises, is that she had “internalised the shame” of her rural upbringing. Now she feels she has not “just the right but the duty” to represent her community. “The news, the movies, TV, it’s all manufactured in cities about city people. We’re nothing. And if we do show up, it’s as a joke, the hillbillies. We are the last demographic that progressive people still mock with impunity.”

Not after Demon Copperhead, they won’t. It owns a punch of which Dickens would have been proud.

Did I mention Copperhead’s authorial voice? It combines sunny panache with adolescent uncertainty, deadpan coolness with a glittering sense of societal injustice.

Buy it, read it, believe it.

Move over, Poisonwood Bible. This is Kingsolver’s masterpiece.