I loved this book,
it is one that I definitely might reread it in the future.
Already the first
sentence is great: “First, I got myself born”. Demon Copperhead
tells the story of Demon Copperhead, well, actually it’s Barbara
Kingsolver telling the story of Appalachia, where the author is a
native local. It is very easy to read, very flowy, despite its
emotionally hard to digest content.
Demon grows up in
Lee county, West Virginia, part of the Appalachian mountains region
on the east side of the US, closer to Tennessee and Kentucky, than to
the coast, a place of dense wood and
dirt roads.
There are a lot of
prejudices, about the people there, it is said they are hillbillies,
know nothing of city life, life like on TV, they are dead poor, use
drugs, and never go anywhere.
Demon knows the
people there at least are self sufficient, know how to garden and
hunt and listen to the birds, and are resilient. Demon’s story is
told from his perspective, as a first person narrator. It is kind of,
as well, a retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (which
I have not yet read), a modern equivalent set in another continent
and century, whereby the structure is similar, chapter by chapter,
but especially the female characters differ.
Demon was born as
Damon, but everyone in this place has a Nickname of sorts, so it was
clear that no one would call him Damon. In Lee country is seems there
are more trailers than real houses, I believe trailers is what we
call mobile-homes in Europe, cheap movable houses, made for holidays
or seasonal workers. Damon lives in a trailer, owned by the neighbors
to whom they pay a little rent and who look after them.
It’s the 90’s.
Damon’s mother, a single mom after the dead of her partner, was
into drugs and alcohol, she was found passed out with the baby coming
out but still in his sack, a miracle he survived. In Damon’s
perspective it was him who had to do it all by himself from the
start, get himself born.
He is called
Copperhead because he is a redhead, and because this place is full of
snakes that are called Copperhead and are venomous.
He has a great
childhood running through the woods, playing in the creeks with his
best friend and neighbor, Matthew Peggot. alias Maggot, while his
mother off-and-on gets sober and works at the supermarket and then
get drunk again.
He is that kind of
child who draws a lot and knows how to draw very well, mostly comics
and superheroes.
The Peggots who are
Maggots grandparents because his mother is in jail, sometimes take
him on trips to the city when they visit aunt June and their adopted
daughter Emmy. June and Emmy widen Demons horizon and light up his
world.
Demon’s father
died before he was born, he drowned at a place called the Devil’s
bathtub, but Damon doesn’t really know much about the circumstances
and doesn’t ask, he only knows that bathtubs scare him. He has
never seen the ocean and dreams of going there one day, for of the
way he was born he is convinced he cannot drown, his only but strong
superpower.
He grows up very
close to his neighbors family, a boy his age named Maggot, Matthew
Peggot, grows up to be queer and of quite a passive character, living
with the grand parents, mother in prison.
Then his mother
brings home this new boyfriend, his new "step Dad", called
Stoner. Stoner, a stereotype of toxic masculinity abuses Damon with
mostly psychological but also physical violence, and prohibits him to
see his “queer” friend Maggot. His mother cares but doesn’t
really know what to do.
- Maybe stop reading
here if you don’t want to read spoilers. Read on if you don’t
mind, I think the book is enjoyable even knowing the rough plot
outline. If you have read the novel I would love to hear your opinion
on it.
...
Okay, so from here
poor Demons’ life kind of unravels.
His mother gets
pregnant, they talk about marriage, then gets hospitalized with an
overdose and then to rehab, and later dies from abuse of drugs and
medication. For the time his mom is in the hospital and rehab Damon
gets pulled into the Social Childcare Services featuring social
workers who don’t care because they have a lot of cases all as
severe and sad and don’t earn enough money to really have the time
to dedicate themselves to their protected ones. He gets to foster
care. First on a farm with other fostered kids, one impressive
teenager called Fast Forward, and the fragile Tommy who draws
skeletons. They have to do heavy farm chores all day for the old man
who takes in fosters to pay his bills. He still hopes he can get back
home eventually and live with the Peggots and be out of reach of
Stoner, he is not an orphan, but he gets disappointed. His mom
overdoses and the Peggots are getting old and don’t feel capable of
taking in Damon.
So now he is a real
orphan, working on a farm for a bit of food and a filthy cold bed.
They even have to work the tobacco fields where he ends up to get
Nicotin poisoning from working without gloves.
He changes to Middle
School and is respected by the kids because of his tall size, his
skills in drawing, and friendship to Fast Forward who is a famous
footballer. He changes foster family and it gets worse, another
family who takes in a foster because of the money the states pays
them to feed the boy. There Demon sleeps in the laundry room and
almost starves the whole time. They get him a job at the back of a
small shop along the highway who set up a service, people can drop of
their garbage there against a small fee and so they don’t have to
drive all the way to the landfill and recycling facilities. Demons
job is it to sort through the garbage, separate materials, compact
stuff and drain batteries. He starts eating whatever edible scraps he
finds, it is truly heartbreaking. The place seems to be a cover for a
meth lab where they use battery acid, run by a friend of Stoner’s,
if I understood correctly.
He manages to save
up some money and then decides to run away from his misery,
hitchhiking to Murder Valley, Tennessee, to find his grandmother.
After another couple of bad experiences where you wonder if it ever
stops getting worse, he finds his grandmother, Betsy Wooddall. She is
a peculiar woman but helps Damon, gives him food, a good bed and
serious conversation. She tells him he looks just like his father.
Betsy is seen as an old witch but she has raised many children and
relatives in a strict but just manner. She agrees to see what she can
do to help Demon and finds him a place with the man who is the coach
of the famous high school football team the Generals. He has a huge
house where he lives with his daughter called Angus and a woman who
is employed to cook and clean.
Coach Winfield has a
jealous assistant called U-Haul who is eager to please coach to get
some of his fame and money. Demon doesn’t trust him from the
beginning. Coach is a great coach, he even starts practise with Demon
before he has the age to make the football team, but he also has a
problem with booze and spends the evenings closed in his office at
home leaving the children on their own in the castle like house with
an American Express credit card. At school Demon studies the bare
minimum but connects with his English teacher Lewis Armstrong who
tells the class about Appalachia’s history, about the mining and
the workers and peoples dreams and fights for recognition.
Armstrong’s girlfriend is the art teacher who sees Demons talent
and together they try to keep Demon engaged in his education while he
becomes a football star, goes to parties, gets into alcohol and
interested in girls.
I won’t go on
retelling everything, but long story short Damon gets into drugs, he
has been sniffing cleaning products from an early age just to try it,
as most kids do, then got to taste joints and pills at the farm with
Fast Forward. He gets heavily into opioids, and in the book it is
very understandable, giving his suffering throughout his life and a
severe knee injury when he is a football player at High School.
Things gets heavy and deep and harsh for Demon and his girlfriend,
and eventually as well for Emmy Peggot. people die, but in the end
there is hope.
- I did some
research on this place and the opioid crisis, well mostly through
Youtube videos, a lot of it is actually pretty well explained in the
novel.
The place was busy
and abundant when the mines were open, even though mining is work
that destroys peoples health and workers were just workers, ants for
the powerful companies who owned the mines and a also owned a lot of
the rest of the land and the towns. But they made good money back
then. The people were left behind after the mining industries shut
down, they was nowhere to find other jobs, many people filed
disability because of bad lungs and bad backs. The tobacco industry
stopped being profitable when anti-tobacco laws got introduced in 2004.
Most people there grew tobacco as an additional income source on
small patches of flat land they had. Now they were paid small
compensations not to grow tobacco, but people cannot live from that.
In that scene of poverty, unemployment come the Pharma companies
smelling money. This remote place in the Appalachian valleys has a
very small number of doctors for a lot of sick people. Aunt June
Peggot is a nurse and she witnesses how hard people have to fight for
even minimal health care. And she witnesses the Painkiller industry
taking advantage of that. As we all know the US health system is one
of the worst, in the sense that it is highly capitalistic and not
designed to cater to the financially weak. Prescribing pills is a lot
cheaper than physical therapy or surgery or anything else, so they
only cover that.
It worked like that,
people in chronic pain would go to see a doctor and the doctor would
not be able to make follow up appointments, not seeing the same
patient again in six months or so, so they prescribe painkillers in
big quantity despite the known risks of dependency. In the novel
Demon’s girlfriend’s Dad is dying and his palliative care
consists of nurses coming around every know and then giving out
fentanyl patches, leaving the rest of the care to his daughter. Pain
clinics were set up, places where doctors do nothing else but renew
opioid prescriptions against money. People start selling a bit of
their pills to pay the rent, buyers never fail.
Wikipedia says:
“Between 1991 and 2011, painkiller prescriptions in the U.S.
tripled from 76 million to 219 million per year. In 2016, more than
289 million prescriptions were written for opioid drugs.”
A big-pharma company
called Purdue marketed the Oxycontin pills referring pain as the 5th
vital sign, and telling people the risk of addiction was minimal.
Insurance companies don’t cover or only very minimally cover rehab
and rehab medication costs which makes it even harder for the doctors
and the affected people.
In the end Aunt June
tells Demon addiction is a disease and this disease was brought on
him, it was not his fault.
Although the
descriptions of drug use and all the social implications of it are
devastating and even shocking the novel is a great read, not only in
the educational sense, there is a lot of action and emotional
engagement. It is a coming of age story but is so much more, it draws
a whole panorama of what society is like in the Appalachians. Despite
everything it is a place with kind-hearted down to earth people which
I actually would love to visit one day.
What didn’t I
like? I thought while it is overall a great novel with gripping
unique characters, Angus seemed a bit too perfect, and U-Hauls
evilness doesn’t get an explanation.
Want to learn more
interesting stuff, google who the Melungeons were or are.
The novel was listed
for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and won the 2023 Women's
Prize for Fiction. The author who in her interviews comes across as a
very likable lady, donates some of the sales money from the novel to
drug addiction recovery facilities
