The author takes us on a journey with Demon that becomes more real than we’d perhaps like to acknowledge.

Throughout its nearly 600-page telling, Kingsolver does everything right, so that by the end of the story, it is not difficult to attach the word masterpiece to this novel. Caught between polemic and fairy tale, Kingsolver is stuck with an anticlimax. Credit where due: It’s hard to think of another living novelist who could take a stab at Dickens and rise above the level of catastrophe. These are premise problems, not sentence problems. In a novel ostensibly about self-creation, Demon’s addiction is a narrative impasse. Kingsolver generates momentum by galloping the reader through escapades that accumulate to advance a larger question. Although it is technically legal to spoil the ending of a story devised 173 years ago, I won’t, except to note that Kingsolver’s resolution departs in one major way from that of David Copperfield, which is almost universally regarded as a disappointment. Like Dickens, she is unblushingly political and works on a sprawling scale, animating her pages with the presence of seemingly every creeping thing that has ever crept upon the earth. From another angle: Of course Barbara Kingsolver would retell Dickens. Kingsolver’s resurrection of Dickens’s most sentimental.novel might seem a bit strange.

Read Full Review >Ī close retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, which is either a baffling choice or an ingenious maneuver. Demon Copperhead becomes a form of poverty porn, a slum tour where pity is the price of the ride. But one of the problems with social novels intended to heighten our understanding is that in writing about traumas, the writer risks turning suffering into entertainment, and stripping the characters of agency. Novels entertain, and many have also argued that reading novels increases our empathy for others. She makes the people of Appalachia into objects of pity, but in doing so, also intimates that falling into drug abuse, rejecting education, and 'clinging' to their ways are moral choices that keep them in their dire circumstances. Her characters wallow in dark hollows with little light, condemned to forever repeat the horrific mistakes of previous generations. In seeking to raise awareness of child hunger and poverty in the United States, Kingsolver turns her characters’ lives into tales of misery and the inevitability of failure.

Kingsolver makes little mention of Appalachian history or resilience. In Kingsolver’s depiction of her Appalachian setting, virtually no one gets out alive. She hangs markers of poverty - the coal country location, a town considered 'right poor' - like wind chimes on Demon’s single-wide trailer to catch her readers’ ears. Kingsolver must make clear Demon’s straitened circumstances. It’s not clear that using David Copperfield is the best way to tell Demon’s story.

Demon copperhead book review