I haven’t read David Copperfield although I once owned a ginormous brick of a hardback copy when I was 7. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. It’s the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Yet, rather than feeling for the characters’ wasted and brutalised lives, the reader is too busy focusing on Kingsolver’s virtuosic reworking of their models.Blurb : “Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.”ĭemon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. She writes in an afterword that she wants to counter ‘hillbilly stereotypes’ and draw attention to ‘the limited choices and suffocated hopes, poverty built into a region by historical design’. But her fidelity to Dickens’s plot is an increasing distraction.

Only Uriah Heep (here U-Haul) and the Micawbers (the McCobbs) are poorly integrated into her scheme. The parallels proliferate Kingsolver even has Emmy living in ‘a geographic dome… like a boat turned upside down’, redolent of Mr Peggotty’s ‘black barge’. Like David, Demon is reunited with Betsy, an elderly female relative (here his grandmother), and her disabled brother Dick (thankfully without King Charles’s head), before going to live with Coach Winfield and his daughter Agnes, whom he initially takes for a boy, and falling in love with the drug-addled Dori, who, like Dora Spenlow in the original, has a snappish dog named Jip.

Demon copperhead review