Diane Awerbuck reviews Barbara Kingsolver's prize-winning novel

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver, Faber

5 stars

In ancient Greece, pilgrims to the Oracle of Delphi found three maxims inscribed outside the temple they sought: Know thyself. Nothing too much. Promises bring trouble.

Even now they’re a good manifesto, and an accurate framework for Barbara Kingsolver’s brilliant book Demon Copperhead. Her 10th novel has just won the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction — the second time she has won the award. She is the only double winner (first in 2010 with The Lacuna) and has also bagged the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

Demon Copperhead uses as its template David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. It’s somehow both exhilarating and exhausting that the plot and themes are unchanged after so many years. Both writers are persuaded that it’s nurture not nature that dictates the lives of humans, and that society, in short, sucks.

But where Dickens wants moral and social improvement — to preserve the status quo, but in a kinder form — Kingsolver is arguing for fundamental institutional change: to overturn it.

Damon Fields must learn to know himself. He narrates his life story in large, circussy images and choppy sentences that mimic the oral culture of the Virginian Appalachians. Born a Melungeon (dark-skinned, blue-eyed and of mixed ancestral origin) into feckless and fatherless poverty, he doesn’t seem to stand a chance against the dead relatives, drug addiction, bigotry and self-sabotage that follow. Nicknamed Demon — and you’ll find out why soon enough — he is destined to be a disregarded foot-soldier of the powerless demographics: even his exploitive Coach can’t “see the worth of boys like me, beyond what work can be wrung out of us by a week’s end. Farm field; battlefield; football field.”

There are snakes throughout the novel: the warnings about copperheads that never materialise (because it’s the human snakes in the grass you should fear); a snake bracelet; the snakebite of oxycontin addiction which is Demon’s lifelong struggle. Perhaps the most effective poison is institutional propaganda, and its expectations, disappointments, depression. Consciousness is pain. No wonder there’s an ongoing opioid crisis.

But Kingsolver, whose family roots are here, rehabilitates the hillbilly stereotypes “in a language that my years outside of Appalachia tried to shame from my tongue”. Writing this epic required a largeness of heart and a great deal of spiritual stamina. She has the beatific ability to look with a loving eye on the worst human impulses without misanthropy.

Reading the novel needs a similarly Dickensian effort. It’s impossible to read without outrage and weeping. Over the next 500 or so pages, Demon takes back his story and recasts it: “not proud; not forgetting”, trying his hand at football and other back-breaking jobs that lead nowhere, avoiding army recruiters and coal mining while dodging bad women and worse men. He grows, and he sheds his skin, even as he reverts to his reptilian nature and bites the hand that handles him.

Here is where Kingsolver most diverges from Dickens — in her impassioned ecological activism, long a trademark of her writing, and another iteration of poison. The war has always been between the land and the city: everything must be commodified, taxed, controlled.

“Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive.”

Demon’s trauma processing is making sense from the chaos visited on him so that the damage stops. To know ourselves is also to understand our limitations, and to know where our home is: “It’s hard to explain how you can miss a place and want it with all your heart, and be utterly sure it will obliterate you the instant you touch down ... Age-old heartbreak of this place, your great successes fly away, your failures stick around.”

Kingsolver’s role as public commentator cannot be overestimated. Like Hilary Mantel, Annie Proulx and Donna Tartt — with whom she shares aesthetic and ethical aspects — her work is always medico-spiritual intervention. Demon starts out as a tormented little boy but, despite his odds, ends up a decent man. If we are reptiles, let us be the caduceus, Hermes-Mercury’s winged stick entwined with two snakes, as he does duty as the messenger of the gods.

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