Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


My wife can attest to the fact that, ever since reading David Copperfield thirty-five or so years ago, I’ve half-jokingly talked about the novel I intended to write about a poor boy from Brooklyn, David Cooperstein, finding his way in the world. I suppose I could still do it, but Barbara Kingsolver will have already taken the wind out of my sails, as her take on David Copperfield set in Appalachia, Demon Copperhead, has been a huge success, winning the Pulitzer Prize and others.

Like David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead is a gripping read. It follows the general outline of Dickens’s semi-autobiographical classic (his best novel, in my opinion as well as Dickens’s) down to the characters and many events. Even when the parallels became forced, they made me smile, as if I were listening to a jazz group’s version of an old classic. Overall, the book raced along and kept my interest throughout its thousand plus pages on my e-reader.

Kingsolver’s tale is tonally very different than Dickens’s, though. It isn’t nearly as warming, for one. This is partly from necessity, I think. Dickens highlighted poverty, the cruelty of child labor, and other social issues in Victorian life. To do this, he created a cast of memorable characters for readers to love, a sweet coating to deliver a bitter medicine. In Kingsolver’s case, assuming that people generally know about poverty and the opioid crisis, her book slaps you in the face with the reality of it, practically screaming, “Pay attention!” There are harsh, extended segments dealing with the consequences of addiction that reminded me of The Story of Christiane F. more than anything by Dickens. And people often behave despicably, including many who should be helping Demon.

Demon Copperhead is a great achievement, no doubt, and very effective in many ways, but it works more as social criticism than a beloved novel. The main problem is that Demon has little agency. Things happen to him, not because of the choices he makes. David Copperfield famously begins, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” Dickens’s novel is about the formation of a complete person. Demon Copperhead, in contrast, is foremost about the societal problems, particularly the oppressive effects of poverty and drug addiction. It begins, “First I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.” It’s passive, resigned, and cynical.

This tone runs throughout the book. Even though it’s told from Demon’s point of view, his life choices seem imposed on him, as if he’s had no say in the matter. In the end, this makes it a less satisfying book than it could have been. While Demon is saved in the end, he gives little thought as to the consequences of his own actions or why he was lucky enough to be saved.

That all said, if my David Cooperstein turns out half as good as this, I’d be pretty happy with myself. Demon Copperhead is an important book highlighting social problems we should be paying a lot more attention to, and well worth reading.

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars


John Wyndham was a mid-twentieth century author who, to my mind, follows in the tradition of literate English science fiction writers like H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. I’d only read his The Day of the Triffids before and liked it very much, although maybe not as much as the wonderfully weird (and not very faithful) sci-fi movie adaptation from the early 60’s. The Midwich Cuckoos was likewise turned into a classic horror film that I’d seen and loved as a kid. Called Village of the Damned, it was then remade by John Carpenter in 1995 into what I remember as not his best work.

The basic plot is that one day, everyone in a small, remote English village falls asleep. The military, called in to investigate, uses animals to determine the boundaries of the phenomenon and also discovers that there is a mysterious metal object on the ground at the center of the effect. After a day, everyone suddenly wakes up with no apparent ill effects, and the object is gone. Several weeks later, though, people begin to realize that every woman of child-bearing age is now pregnant. The novel focuses on how the close-knit people in this small town cope as their unusual children are born, clearly not their own, and begin to display alarming abilities to control them. Quiet, understated, and philosophical, the novel addresses how people respond to what amounts to an alien invasion involving mass rape, forced pregnancy, and coerced parenthood.

The novel does seem outdated in using a male-centered, outsider perspective to depict something so intimately imposed through the women of the town. The restrained style is also almost too much for the outlandish events depicted, although it is typical for a novel taking place in a small English town at this time. It certainly does help add more tension. Overall, this is a creepy, unsettling, and thought-provoking novel.