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.
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