Barbara Kingsolver, 2022
I’ve been telling everyone to read this book. It is easily in the top five books I’ve ever read, and that rating is based almost entirely on the remarkable voice.
The narrator is Damon, aka Demon Copperhead, who lives in Lee County, southern Appalachia. He is poor and desperate a lot of the time, but the sadness of the novel is beautifully balanced with the love he clearly feels for his environment. He doesn’t have a home a lot of the time, but he feels at home in Lee County and he is loved by many people.
Since this novel is modeled on David Copperfield, I hope it is not a spoiler to say Damon’s mother dies early in the novel, and he is orphaned. His father died before he was born. But this doesn’t mean Damon lacks mother figures in his life. His best friend’s grandmother and aunt take a lot of responsibility for him, as well as a few others throughout the story. But of course, he does not have his actual mother, and his relationship with her was troubled. She was an addict, and he resented her for her inability to stay clean for his benefit and stand up to her new husband when he abused Damon, and even for her death. He mourns the loss of his mother, but also that he never truly had a mother. About himself and some of his friends, he laments:
Many had tried their best with us, but we came out of too-hungry mothers. Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.
Demon Copperhead, p.385
Here Damon acknowledges all he lacks because of his mother’s inability to care for him properly. But he doesn’t blame her directly. His mother was “too hungry.” She didn’t have the love and commitment she deserved, either, and that pain became generational. I think the implication here is some people are simply not able to parent adequately; if they have suffered and continue to suffer, how can they offer love properly to anyone else, including their own children? Our society often assumes that mother love simply happens. Perhaps it does. But this novel, and Damon, inspire an examination of how persistently and adequately that love can be practiced. It may be felt, but if it is shadowed by addiction and self-loathing, it will never be enough to protect the child for his own life-long pain.
Damon is an unforgettable character who, in the weeks after reading, remains in my mind. This is a novel that shows us that people living in poverty are often forgotten or overlooked. The “south” is dubbed backward and stupid, dismissed for being Trump-loving idiots. What Kingsolver does so beautifully (and subtly) in this novel is demonstrate how dangerous this line of thinking can be. People with different opinions are not “bad”; they simply experience a different lifestyle that informs their world-view. Damon is insightful, thoughtful, flawed and loving. He is like everyone else in the world but suffers so much more. Five stars.
I watched a mother rat run in and out of the logs, carrying her babies by their napes from one part of the stack to another. She’d appear with them one by one, all business, like she’s on the clock here, relocating her office space. How she decided one part of this wreck was less dangerous than any other, no guess.
Demon Copperhead, p. 474
Monica Cardenas 