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In Barbara Kingsolver’s New Novel, an Appalachian David Copperfield

“Demon Copperhead” reimagines Dickens’s story in a modern-day rural America contending with poverty and opioid addiction.

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By Molly Young

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DEMON COPPERHEAD, by Barbara Kingsolver

In “Demon Copperhead,” Barbara Kingsolver offers a close retelling of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield,” which is either a baffling choice or an ingenious maneuver from a novelist who has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and selected for Oprah’s Book Club and regularly — inevitably, even — appears on the best-seller list of this newspaper, all while reaping a surprising quantity of stinging pans from critics.

Kingsolver’s resurrection of Dickens’s most sentimental (though cherished by many, including me) novel might seem a bit strange — as if Harry Styles had released a song-for-song remake of the original cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific.”

But then, from another angle: Of course Barbara Kingsolver would retell Dickens. He has always been her ancestor. 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. Exhuming him is a way for her to make a claim of inheritance explicit at a time when teeming, boisterous, activist novels are unfashionable. It is an argument that this loss of prestige is unwarranted, impermanent, even benighted, and it is a rebuttal of the notion that ideologues can’t make great novelists, or that novels are no longer plausible vehicles for social change.

Finished this book and can’t stop thinking about it? Want to unpack it with other readers?

Listen to our book club episode of the Book Review podcast , where our editors discuss how Barbara Kingsolver adapts Dickens, why this book continues to resonate and more (including, of course, spoilers).

Before we consider those questions: the plot. Damon Fields is born in southwest Virginia in the late 1980s to a teenage mother who has equipped herself for childbirth with gin, amphetamines and Vicodin. An attitude problem soon earns him the nickname “Demon.” His hair color explains “Copperhead.” When Mom overdoses Demon becomes a ward of the state, which is to say he undergoes a transformation from “boy” to “inventory.” He’s obsessed with Marvel superheroes and draws his own comics. In fifth grade he accidentally works at a meth lab.

High school football delivers a brief spell of glory. Then: knee injury, doctor-prescribed painkillers, opioid addiction, young love and a relentless chain of tragedies interrupted sporadically with minor victories. 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.

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‘Demon Copperhead’ Review: A Heart-Wrenching Portrait of the Opioid Crisis

“They did this to you.” Other characters drill this assuration into the mind of Demon, the main character of Barbara Kingsolver’s newest novel, “Demon Copperhead.” The book, set in a poor county in southern Appalachia during the opioid epidemic, deals with the large question of who is to blame for a crisis. Kingsolver uses the perspective of a young boy to showcase the true parties at fault in rural America, including the institutional structures that ruin lives, corrupt children, and send communities into cycles of ruin. Inspired by the sweeping narrative of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield,'' Kingsolver uses compelling characters and an underrepresented setting to create a heart-wrenching portrait of the American opioid crisis.

Demon Copperhead — his first name a twist on “Damon,” his last name owed to the red hair he inherited from his father — has a lot of troubles. From the beginning, though, he takes responsibility for his entire life. The novel starts with the words, “First, I got myself born,” and from there Demon faces a variety of harrowing childhood experiences, including an opioid-addicted mother, an abusive stepfather, intense grief, child labor, and negligent guardianship. The responsibility that he takes for matters outside of his control makes readers immediately sympathetic for Demon. His resilience is repeatedly put on display, even as the mental scars of trauma start to weigh down upon him. Demon briefly rises from his troubles to become a star on his local football team — but this respite is interrupted by a devastating injury. This leads to Demon’s first use of opioids, and then the novel follows the arc of his life after this dreaded introduction.

This novel draws upon both current problems in Appalachia and the way that Dickens brought the lives of the trodden-down into public consciousness. Kingsolver, known for her acclaimed novel “The Poisonwood Bible,” was raised in rural Kentucky. There, she saw the effects of the opioid crisis in Appalachia first-hand. After visiting Charles Dickens’s home in England, Kingsolver was inspired by his “impassioned critique of institutional poverty” and decided to tackle modern American problems in a similar fashion. Her novel is just as eye-opening about the opioid epidemic as Dickens’s stories were for Victorian readers. Kingsolver’s deep admiration for Dickens shines throughout the novel; she refers to him as her “genius friend in the Acknowledgements. Even Demon compliments Dickens directly: “Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”

Kingsolver reflects Dickens in other ways, too: Just as some people turn away from Dickens’s notoriously lengthy tales, the page count of “Demon Copperhead” — nearly 550 pages — has the potential to daunt readers. This is not without reason; books that reach this length often contain tangents that strike fast-paced readers as unnecessary. Sometimes the novel gets stuck in a “rinse and repeat” storyline, in which Demon escapes some form of torturous supervision just to get trapped in another. However, this torrent of misery is an effective way to emphasize the many obstacles that the people of Appalachia faced during the opioid crisis: a never-ending stream of misfortune that seemed inescapable.

The novel focuses on Demon, but it also features the strong women who shape his life. Although his mother’s addiction negatively impacts Demon, her love always stays with him. Other female influences in his life include Mrs. Peggot, his elderly neighbor who helps care for him when his mother is distracted, and June, another Peggot relative that becomes a guiding light in Demon’s life after he tunnels into addiction. Kingsolver crafts the Peggot women as the embodiment of resilience and kindness amidst the crisis. There are more amazing female characters, but the one that shines is Angus, Demon’s foster sister. Angus defies expectations of both Applachian and female stereotypes, and is one of the only characters that truly recognizes how much Demon has gone through. Kingsolver’s strong female characters show the especially intense struggles that women underwent during the opioid crisis — forced to face the dangers of addiction while often being put into roles in which they had to care for others.

The novel also stands against stereotypes of rural Americans — Demon often remarks that city people don’t understand Appalachian life. He begins to see how his county has been systematically ignored throughout the crisis and the way that opioids were peddled recklessly to vulnerable community members. Demon is able to survive the institutions that worked against him — but he also acknowledges that so many lives were not adequately protected. Kingsolver reveals the humanity behind the numbers of the crisis and the stereotypes that prevented help from coming to the places that needed it the most.

Overall, the novel has the potential to open the eyes of many Americans that have been sheltered from the opioid crisis, whether they were oblivious to its toll on rural areas or are too young to remember its significance and the scars that it has inflicted on some of our country’s most defenseless groups. The dreary subject matter will not be for everyone, and those afraid of lengthy novels may be intimidated, but “Demon Copperhead” is an odyssey not to miss. It highlights the resilience and strength that can grow from some of the world’s darkest places, and reminds us not to ignore and belittle those who have grown up in a world that works against them.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2022

New York Times Bestseller

Pulitzer Prize Winner

DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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