Demon Copperhead (4*)

 

To be here was to be known. If Lee County isn’t that, it’s nothing.

So says Damon, the allusively nicknamed title character of Barbara Kingsolver's irresistible take on David Copperfield, supposedly the classic Victorian novel that most accurately reflects the impoverished childhood of its author, Charles Dickens.  

Kingsolver has a couple of additional axes to grind in her galloping, contemporary homage. Her sharpest is the critique of a prejudice that looks, in retrospect, as if it at least partially accounts for the defeat of the Democratic party in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2024, namely the candidates' refusal to "know" Americans without college educations who reside in non-urban areas. 

 

Hillbilly is a word everybody knows.  Except they don't. Mr. Peg at one time had a sticker on his truck bumper, “Hillbilly Cadillac,” but I was a small kid with no comprehension of anything . . . All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.

Damon and the other residents of Lee County, a sliver of the westernmost part of Virginia, nestled between the borders of Kentucky and Tennessee, personify this group, stereotyped and demeaned by liberals.  He makes their resentment plain.

Nobody rides you like you ride yourself, they say. But we get more than our share of help. These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not.

And because the "liberal elite" with good health insurance didn't give a shit about these folks, they became easy prey for a ruthless pharmaceutical company that deliberately targeted them for addiction, Kingsolver's second ax, as well as a cynical Republican party.  

Damon, a damaged but sweet guy who surely has one of the most distinctive voices in American literature, narrates the harrowing tale.  He's been dealt an awful hand from the get go, with the death of a father he never has known in the Devil's Bathtub, and a barely functional teenage mother trying to raise him and maintain her sobriety while stocking shelves in Walmart's holiday department.

If you’re surprised a mom would discuss boyfriend hotness with a kid still learning not to pick his nose, you’ve not seen the far end of lonely. Mom would light me a cigarette and we’d have our chats, menthols of course, this being in her mind the child-friendly option. I thought smoking with Mom and discussing various men’s stud factors was a sign of deep respect.

Damon's pluck and determination carry him through trial after trial, establishing what an African American high school counselor eventually identifies as his resilience, not long after he has decided he's had enough of child exploitation on a tobacco farm and foster-home hunger.  He runs away, meeting bad characters and good, all indelible, including a wily prostitute who steals the cash he has saved sorting garbage for a south Asian untouchable, and a man-hating grandma who nevertheless gives him his first break and taste of tough love.

Kingsolver clearly knows whereof she writes, her highest achievement.  She describes a backwoods keg party with 1990s verisimilitude.  

June’s house had no real yard, just a clearing in the woods, now crowded with people yelling at each other over top of Eminem. Extension cords ran from the house to some big speakers borrowed from school, because drama kids got away with shit like that, so the cattle in the neighbors’ farms were now trying to chew or moo over top of Eminem. The trees were shaking, and the dirt under our feet. I shouldered in to find the keg that Emmy’s parties were starting to get famous for, regardless June keeping Emmy in the egg carton. June would not have us driving the winding roads to get our drinking on. Do it here and sleep it off, was her policy, and she meant it. Start slurring or tripping and she’d take your keys, ordering you to sleep on whatever floor you could find, and please not on your back. Live to see another day. She was convinced the population of Lee County was headed for zero, because in any given year she saw more people dead of DWI-wrecks and vomit-choke than babies born.

Of course, it's not only alcohol that threatens the population of Lee County.  Prescription drugs killed Damon's mother and oxy's coming for him and his girlfriend, too.  Alas, when it does, just after a knee injury that curtails Damon's tragically brief high school glory days, the novel morphs into a more familiar story of addiction and recovery, albeit one more sharply observed than most.

I thought I knew it all in those days. I’d seen people at school, in the locker room, even at Mr. Peg’s funeral, with stains on their shirttails. Greenish grass stains, or pinkish brown like dirt. How could those people be so prideless, I thought, showing up in dirty shirts. I didn’t know that was the coating of a pill that keeps this safer-than-safe drug from dissolving in your stomach all at one time. Coppery pink on the 80 milligrams, green on the 40s. Melts in your mouth like an M&M. Hold it there a minute, then take it out and rub it on your shirttail, and you’re looking at a shiny white pearl of pure oxy. More opioid than any pill ever before invented. One buck gets you a whole bottle of these on Medicaid, to be crushed and snorted one by one, or dissolved and injected with sheep-vax syringes from Farm Supply, in the crook of an arm or the webbing of your toes. People find more ways to shut up their monsters than a Bible has verses.

Friendship, cartooning and the love of a good woman eventually help Damon achieve his life-long desire but by this time Kingsolver's novel has devolved from an empathetic portrait of a preternaturally wise young man into a fairy tale whose distinctive setting has been replaced by a far fetched dark and stormy night in, yes, the Devil's Bathtub.  In the end, Demon Copperhead may be more true to Dickens than the rural life about which Kingsolver has written so persuasively.  

Pope Francis (1936-2025)

"If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?" (July 2013) 

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aries, Riding the Subway (Pablo Leguizamon, 2008)

More People I Loved:

Marianne Faithfull

David Lynch

Earl Holliman

Gena Rowlands

Shelley Duvall

Roger Corman

Faith Ringgold

Richard Serra

Alexei Navalny

Pee Wee Herman

Glenda Jackson

George Maharis

Tina Turner

Burt Bacharach

Angela Lansbury

Queen Elizabeth II

Sidney Poitier

Joan Didion

Stephen Sondheim

Edward Albee

Muhammad Ali

North Woods (4*)

Had I known North Woods would be populated by ghostly apparitions and set in a world of natural wonder, I probably would have dismissed it as too twee for me.  But Magda ranked this Rubik's Cube of a novel with All Fours as two of the best books she's read in years so I stuck patiently with the disorienting, occasionally confusing structure, although its chronology is quickly identifiable as an impressionistic history of America since its colonization.

Daniel Mason, clearly a writer with extraordinarily broad interests, mixes nature, Americana, pulp fiction, schizophrenia, family ties, clairvoyance, landscape painting and apples in a mysterious brew that occasionally intoxicates with empathy and ultimately soothes with a gradually revealed purpose.  Everything is connected if you look hard enough although the meaning may vanish with the relentless passage of time.

She was struck by the discrepancy in meaning the belongings presented. That death meant not only the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance. A candle that might have once provided comfort in the winter darkness, a shawl gifted by an erstwhile suitor, a pheasant that recalled her poor lost grandfather. Old brass, old rag, old bird.

47 Pianos, my apartment, in a nutshell.

A remote farmhouse in western Massachusetts that conceals murderous secrets and eventually becomes the pandemic retreat of a Hollywood actor, serves as the book's central metaphor.  Poison mushrooms are used to dispatch marauding colonizers; twin sisters suffer the violence of co-dependence long before the term comes into vogue; a damselfly landing on the knee of a transcendental essayist evokes a blushing response among West Coast literature students a century later for mistaken reasons; and a sensitive soul shoots film that records the transmogrified voices of these and other residents who coexist in the past and future.

Then, there, in the room of her empty house, or the archives of the library where one could still find such forgotten equipment, they would watch the screen light up before them—robin, sapling, eternal beetle—the images stripped of all their prior meaning, signifying nothing but the gentle motions of a forest that no longer was. 

As a young atheist, I once drove my motorcycle to Croton-on-Hudson on a brilliant autumn day, marveling at the beauty of the natural world.  "This is the only god that I can worship," I mused while biting into a crisp Red Delicious apple, a feeling that subsequently evinced a comforting economic corollary:  "A rich man can't enjoy a beautiful day any more than I can."

Daniel Mason's appreciation for nature is no less keen and a lot more esoteric, but in an entertaining way (his description of an elm bark beetle's mating dance is funnier than American Pie).  Even better, he manages to maintain his optimism, even in the onslaught of horrors that have beset the American environment--both manmade and not--since the beginning of time.

.  . . she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change. 

North Woods isn't an easy read, but it's an extraordinarily hopeful one.

The Boyhood of Cain (2*)

A gay coming-of-age novel that focuses primarily on childhood development seemed inherently interesting, given how many homosexual authors more typically embroider same-sex longing and the coming-out process.  Unfortunately, young Daniel is a whiny pill so it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for his predicament despite his precociousness and independent thinking.  The kid embraces ambivalence as a creed, bleeding any real joy out of his early life.

Michael Amherst capably conveys how Daniel perceives his family, from the time he idolizes his father as a young child, proud to hold his hand and eager to take advantage of the privileges afforded the headmaster's son.  That pride curdles into contempt when circumstances--his father's alcoholism--force the man to become an inept farmer in the same community.  Even as a pre-teen, Daniel appears to value status above all, which leads him to betray his father more than once in order to curry favor with the men who drink nightly with Daniel's family at the local pub. Needless to say, all but the pervert recoil.

For most of this mercifully brief novel, Daniel treats his mother, a failed actress much younger and more vivacious than her husband, with the degree of sympathy you would expect from a hard-core mama's boy perhaps because she allows him to stay home from school a lot more than he should.  Vivacious here is the key word:  by the book's conclusion Daniel finally understands the depth of her skillfully sketched bipolarity. Still, he reacts with more fury than sadness at her stagy suicide attempt which calls to mind the death of Lupe Vélez in Hollywood Babylon.

Neither religion nor education provide Daniel with much comfort as he struggles to find where he belongs in the world.  When Daniel chooses Judas as his favorite apostle, the vicar isn't surprised given how the budding intellectual has previously tried his patience with persistent questions about Christian dogma.  Amherst invests Daniel's relationship with Mr. Miller, his tweedy (and single) English and art teacher, with the most freight. Miller offers Daniel a private, after-school drawing lessons but readers expecting either pedagogical nurture or sexual molestation will be disappointed unless, perhaps, they inhabit the groves of academe which clearly weaned this exercise in mostly aesthetic conflict.  Miller bullies Daniel for his appreciation of "The Hay Wain," a nineteenth-century painting by John Constable that depicts their rural English environment.

Miller also invites Philip, a popular but solitary athlete, to join their sessions.  Although Daniel initially resents having to share his special status the boys become both friends and rivals for Miller's favor until puberty intervenes.  Drama ensues when Daniel complains to his parents about Miller's behavior.  Gay solidarity--expressed by either generation--is absent from this classroom. 

Here's the rub, although that metaphor is completely absent, too: men, whether straight or gay, are often accused of "thinking" with their dicks, not their heads.  Amherst takes pains to distinguish Daniel in this regard while pinpointing the exact moment that self loathing rears its ugly head.

He would like to be this boy [Philip]. Or to have something of his. If he could be someone else, then he would be this boy. This is the boy he is meant to be.

I recognize this passion; its expression not so much.  I didn't want to be Kim Posich, who similarly embodied many of Philip's qualities, in the fourth grade; I desperately wanted him to kidnap me. 

But that would have been a different, less highbrow book completely devoid of strained Biblical allusions.