The foundational plot of the poor child makes good novels, at least since the days of Moses in the Book of Exodus and Jesus in the gospels, is the abused or abandoned, unloved and often overworked and starving child who eventually carves out a good meaningful life for himself or herself. In modern times this usually includes a lot of alcohol and drug abuse by the teens and adults, along with unexpected deaths, and serial foster homes for the children as in this fiction set in Lee County in the southwestern Virginian Appalachian Mountains, the author’s home territory. This genre may have been developed most extensively by Dickens in his semi-autographical David Copperfield, which this novel is clearly modelled after. Some such stories are heart-rending autobiographies such as Tara Westover’s Educated, and Huosen Lee’s The Girl With Seven Names, but this one, like Nancy Johnson’s The Kindest Lie, is pure fiction.
Narrated in the first person singular by Damian Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead, the orphaned boy tells his story from his birth in the early 1990s (as related to him) to early abuse by a stepfather, and dealing with his mother’s ultimately fatal addictions when he was still a preteen.
After dealing with abuse and child labour in a series of foster homes, Demon is taken in by his high school football coach and becomes a star wide receiver, until he has a critical injury that interrupts his career and leaves him hooked on narcotics. His infatuations with a series of girls leaves him serially sure that he has found the love of his life. The sex with his drug-supplier girlfriend is described pretty graphically and the language throughout the book is hillbilly slang laced with vulgarity-not suitable for reading aloud in polite company.
Almost all of the young characters are addicts, mostly to narcotics, but also to tranquilizers, pot and alcohol. The pill mills, and the nefarious lies of the pharmaceutical company Purdue, makers of OxyContin, are accurately described. The drudgery of coal-mining and the historical exploitation of the locals by the coal companies does not escape notice and blame.
Everyone has an inventive nickname like Stoner, Fast Forward, Maggot, Swap-Out, and Hammer. There are numerous deaths from overdoses and from foolish adventures while stoned. The plot gets complicated as the story progresses, but, somewhat predictably, in the final few chapters, Demon comes clean after a prolonged stay in a rehab program and finds satisfaction and some degree of fame as a talented cartoonist and novelist. The stereotyping of the poor, rural, uneducated, hillbilly rednecks of the southern Appalachians is bemoaned by their more educated urban relatives and neighbours and by Demon after he becomes an urbanite himself, but the whole plot reinforces that stereotype for readers.
What saves this formulaic novel from being a total nonstarter for me is the writing style for which Kingsolver is rightly famous, with vivid descriptions of the people and places. Demon, working as a preteen in a Mini Mart, describes himself as “Mr. Golly’s trash can”, eating all the food heated under lamps but then unsold. Mr. Golly “looked like a little brown tree that somebody forgot to water.”
I previously enjoyed Kingsolver’s Unsheltered and particularly her Flight Behaviour, both much better reads than this one.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10
Thanks, Alana.
The Passionate Reader 