Barbara Kingssolver - Demon Copperhead (2023)

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

Donna Tartt - The secret history (1992)

  

The secret history is a novel about friendship, youth, about wanting to belong. And about fatal flaws. The structure of the book is very unusual and refreshing as it tells the outcomes in its very first pages, namely the murder that occurs. From the very beginning we know who has done it. But we don’t know how things got there and what happened afterwards.

It’s not a book in which the ending or outcome really matters, but the heart of the book.

It is not really a thriller or mystery or detective novel, but basically a psychological study of a couple young students and their group dynamic, blinded by their love for each other, and for ancient Greek culture. I find those themes fascinating. An emotional roller-coaster, a book to get lost in with its 628 pages.

The novel is set in a liberal arts college in the northeast of the United States, in Vermont, so northern it is almost in Canada. I know not everyone had the same college experience, but for many of us it was this kind of place where we tried to form our adult identities and to connect to others in a way to help building these identities, because we admired those friends, and found them beautiful and knowledgeable, especially if we are a bit insecure. We thought our our college friends will be in our lives forever. We also do a lot of sh*t at college because we think we’re adults but instead we are still so young and influencable.

I do enjoy campus novels, in general. I think its the first time I read something of the “dark academia” genre, except maybe Harry potter. I didn’t know about this genre before first googling this book, it’s basically a trend whereby people wear black coats, write with fountain pens and admire gothic architecture and cold weather. The secret history is as gripping a novel as Harry Potter (I myself was the same age as Harry when the books came out, 12, which is a big reason of why and how I became a reader).

As I said The prologue of The secret history already tells the reader about death of Bunny, a murder, Henry’s idea. In the main part, Richard our narrator is looking back and retelling the story from a later point in time, and then he notices a lot was actually ominous, a lot of details, pointing in the bad way things went, he had initially overlooked. That’s the reason I don't think I can really do spoilers, because it’s all there being said in the beginning, when you read it you get on the emotional journey with the characters even knowing the basic facts of the plot.

The narrator Richard Papen grew up middle class-poor on the west coast, Northern California but not the picturesque California, more like eternal suburbia, where there are no trees, everything flat and dust colored. He arrives at Hampden College a bit by chance – or fate, as he puts it of course, and tries to fit in with the rich kids. He tells us his worst flaw is a morbid longing for the picturesque – for whatever that means, it’s on the reader to figure that out. In any case his choice to study Ancient Greek, a kind of random decision proofs to be fateful.

He stumbles upon the group of friends in the library, they study Greek, the one thing they have in common. Everyone of them is a bizarre character.

In the first weeks at the college, Richard gets a student job and goes talk to Greek professor to let him in his class. Julian Morrow, the Greek prof, seems weird and eccentric. There are rumors about him, he keeps big arrangements flowers in his office. Richard insists, even after the prof saying his course is complete, five students are the limit, one more what be too many (foreshadowing). He convinces him to be taken in, but Student services warn him, it is an exception to the normal functioning of the college to be taught almost exclusively by his Greek teacher, and not necessarily good, if problems occur, he can’t go back and change, but in the end they let him.

So he makes friends with the Greek class group and gets to know them. Charles and Camilla are twins, very close to each other, 20 years old, orphans from Virginia, very much not poor. Francis is a thin and nervous boy, he has a very young mother with a rich Daddy, he has exotic looks, is a red head and wears false glasses. Bunny, full name Edmund, 24 years old, is blond, badly dressed, loud, outgoing. Bunny had the typical American childhood with 4 brothers living in Cape Cod, going sailing, etc. And finally Henry, serious, tall, with classes, cold and smart, he seems to be very close to the Greek teacher, and he has a car.

Bunny takes Richard out for dinner for 300 dollars and then says he forgot his wallet. Eventually Henry comes to the rescue. Francis’ family has a big old house in the country belonging to some aunt of this, which they use to spend the weekends.

In the first Greek class they talk about the necessity to channel dyonistic forces (more foreshadowing here). I would have loved to have more insight into the Greek classes, but the author doesn’t dive further into that. I will contain myself here to not spoil more of the narrative, here.

In Vermont it is winter through many month, very different from California, it snows and gets freezing cold. On Christmas break school shuts down because heating is expensive, everyone is with their relatives back home, but Richard having no money for a flight back home, nor the will to go there, spends winter in a rented room warehouse with whole in the roof and almost dies of pneumonia.

Some of the hints are phrases that stick into one’s mind, like honesty being a dangerous virtue, or beauty being related to terror. Right in the beginning Richard says that he has a morbid longing for the picturesque, which I think is not the same as beauty.

Then – !- they kill him, and we’re just about halfway of the novel - what a setup.

In the aftermath, contrary to the expected, they all get real nervous, every class Bunny is missing and they sit around waiting for him, the tension builds up, some try to distract themselves with normal college life, alcohol, sex with no luck. Now the four of them are bonded for life for the good or the bad of it.

I devoured the The secret history, I loved it, it blew my mind, absorbed me and still, when I handed it to my friends they didn’t even seem to be able to get into it, to connect and found all characters annoying and little relatable. It’s a not perfect novel, and those are rare, but still a very very good one, one of those I can imagine to re read in a couple of years despite getting a bit long in the second half.

I really enjoyed The secret history. I think it has some minor problems, for example, you could say it is not very realistic, or the characters are not really people you could want to deal with, but for me these were minor hiccups, I did connect with Richard, the narrator, and I think the novel is a masterpiece. The secret history was Donna Tartt’s debut novel. She was only 28 years old by the time she published it, which is very impressive. I already bought her other big novel “The Goldfinch” and I can’t wait to read it.

Dolly Alderton - Ghosts (2020)

to ghost someone = “the act or practice of abruptly cutting off all contact with someone (such as a former romantic partner) usually without explanation by no longer accepting or responding to phone calls, instant messages, etc.”¹

In this case the Ghosts of the title is also referring to a father losing memories due to dementia, and the protagonist losing her old friendships to their marriages and babies.

My friend referred to it as my sex-and-the-city-novel, and I couldn’t describe it better, it’s all about navigating early adult life, believing or not in marriage and love, about ex boyfriends and dating, about being in your early 30s going out and drink and buying your first house and the anxiety of building a future for you and not getting any younger again. Understandably at this stage of life we sometimes feel still like a child and hesitate with certain decisions or struggle with responsibilities. Notably it’s mostly the men in the novel that are selfish, childish, a bit careless and not even honest about it with themselves.

It is clearly a book written for young women. The main character Nina George Dean just bought her first own flat in London Archway, and is back to dating after her long term relationship broke up. As a first person narrator she is retelling the events that happened in her life between her 32^nd to her 33^rd birthday, the “strangest year of her life”, which to me personally didn’t feel very strange or extraordinary at all. Her name is associated with George Micheal, who’s song was top of the charts when she was born.

Nina works a kitchen book writer publishing her own books, sufficiently successful as to be able to live from it. She published a book called “Taste”, a second one “The tiny kitchen”, and is now starting her third one, weirdly she chats with her editor about her personal life, I don’t know if this is common. She used to be a English teacher like her father, in fact she is very close to her Dad, who has dementia and is deteriorating which is a very difficult condition to witness and accompany.

Nina’s ex boyfriend Joe now has a new girlfriend, she and Joe were together for 7 years, now she has been single for 2. So, Nina decides it’s time to download a dating app and starts dating again. She starts going out with Max, 37, tall, masculine, surfer type, accountant, a bit insecure or at least introvert. They fall in love, but after 3 months of relationship Max disappears all of a sudden.

A lot of the novel is just reciting stereotypes. Nina and her friends talk about how friends and their wives behave, men want to impress, girls want to make friends. Lola is her only single friend, a yoga girl with eccentric taste clothing, always drinking prosecco or wine, talking probably about astrology (I don’t remember) a dating expert. A fun character, the Samantha of Sex and the City.

Katherine is her oldest friend, now married with children and moving to the suburbs with little time or comprehension for her childless friends. Nina also has to handle a strange new neighbour in her building who doesn’t respect anything of basic conviviality rules.

She has always had a difficult relationship with her mother who seems a hateful selfish person, with not much of personality anyway. This is put on a further strain with her Dad’s health issues.

So this is it, not much else happens. Nina is looking for meaning in life, in the decisions made y the people around her, but instead she finds mostly only pragmatism or convenience which disappoints her, but doesn’t make her lose her optimism.

I don’t regret reading Ghosts, but the characters are a bit flat, the plot a bit short, and it straight out bored me. It’s not really bad, but definitely not good either. I found it hard to identify myself in any of the characters, even as a woman in my (late) 30s. I can't relate to this life personally, I have very few couples among my friends who actually got married and going to the pubs and drink is a thing that I left in my 20s. I also know very few people who still celebrate their birthdays is their 30s with cake and invitations and their parents and all. Nina listens to female serial killer podcasts, the kind of “true crime” (the worst category of podcast, in my opinion this makes her even more pathetic). The narrator starts the novel announcing “The strangest year of her life” which makes you want to read it, but in the end to me it looked like a pretty event-less year except for the father’s health deteriorating.

Looking at the cover it becomes clear to me that I normally wouldn’t have chosen to buy this book, but I had read a nice recommendation somewhere and made an effort to not judge it by its cover.

Not really funny, not deep, not really emotional, but very readable, however a bit boring and predictable. The kind of book you can read with half of your brain switched off, just to wind down before sleeping.

1https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ghosting

John Grisham - The street lawyer (1998)

 

I sometimes like to read legal dramas, I have watched all the hundreds of episodes of the TV series Suits. 

I didn't like The Street Lawyer, I was expecting some twist along the way, and waiting for a big trial in the end, but pressure doesnt really build up and the ending is a short settlement (sorry if that's a spoiler).

The story is predictable from the beginning if you read the information on the cover slap, you know pretty much everything. A rich corporate lawyer has an awakening and decides to get rid of his wealth and help the poor for a very small salary. Instead of designer suits he now wears jeans and cuts onions in homeless shelters. He turns against his former law firm defending a bunch of illegally evicted poor in a nasty lawsuit, but to do so he had to steal a file which puts him in a position where he is threatened to lose his law license and get arrested.

The author paints a picture of 1990's Washington D.C. as a place where the poor and the criminal are abundant, where people are afraid of driving through certain neighborhoods and government social programs are cut back all the time. 

I giggled when reading how different some things were back before we all head cell phones with internet and cameras and files had to be faxed and copied, and newspapers bought at the break of dawn, obviously I remember this world, but it's easy to forget how recently these things changed.

Although 300 something pages, it reads very quickly. The characters are caricaturist and little profound, one-dimensional. Either good or bad, not much more to it. My issue with the ending is that is little credible and a bit cheesy.

The Street Lawyer is an easy read, seems like a book for English-learners. I used less neurons reading the novel than I would use scrolling on you phone, therefore even in a work charged week I was able to read a chapter in the morning and a chapter at night.

This is my second John Grisham read. I know this genre is the type of bestsellers sold in train station shops, I don't remember which other novel by Grisham I have read, I was maybe 18 years old at the time, but it was a legal drama as well and for the vague memories I have of it it was a lot better than that one.