★★★★☆ Making heroes of Rednecks and Hillbillies

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver

You already know that Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is a retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Indeed, it is so faithful a retelling that, if the publisher had not already spilled the beans, I would feel compelled to mark this review a spoiler because of mentioning David Copperfield. If you have read David Copperfield at all recently, then you will recognize the characters and the major plot points as you read Demon Copperhead. (I last read David Copperfield when I was a kid in the late 1960s, so I was blessedly free from this detailed anticipation as I read Demon Copperhead. I did, however, check out the Wikipedia plot summary of David Copperfield on finishing Demon Copperhead, so I'm up to speed on both plot outlines.)

And this, I say, is absolutely fine! If you're going to steal, by all means, steal from the best! I am completely in earnest about that. Good stories get retold, and they should. West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet in new clothes, and it is brilliant! The story of Noah's flood was stolen from the Sumerians (Gilgamesh). The tradition of stealing stories goes back as far as story-telling. Of course, it is not really stealing if you're honest about it.

Given what I've just told you, you might expect Demon Copperhead to be a lot like David Copperfield. It is not. Kingsolver transplants Copperfield to Lee County, Virginia, at the height of the oxycodone crisis. Lee County is a real place. Since the Civil War, Virginia has been an oddly-shaped state that thrusts a sharply pointed blade west into the Appalachian mountains. Lee County is the tip of that blade. Kingsolver's biography says she grew up in nearby Kentucky. She knows this country and its people.

Victorian London was grim, but Lee County is arguably grimmer. In my memory David Copperfield is often light-hearted -- Dickens finds things to laugh at. There is very little to laugh at in Demon Copperhead. The child poverty Dickens wrote about is arguably worse in Kingsolver's Lee County. One reason for that is that many, if not most of Kingsolver's characters are addicted to drugs. Victorian London had its addiction problems: alcoholism and laudanum, but the menu of chemicals to abuse was certainly smaller than it is in Kingsolver's Lee County. It makes a grim, grim new way to trap kids in grinding poverty.

Kingsolver has an agenda in Demon Copperhead. She wants us to stop laughing at Appalachia.

There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.

Now, to be honest, I am not entirely persuaded. I mean, I agree that it is wrong to ridicule country folks. (That's not even a concession for me, since I am one myself.) But NO ONE gets immunity from being ridiculed by folks who think they're smarter than you. *Everyone* gets ridiculed for being different. If you've never heard Rednecks ridiculing college boys and libtards and Democraps you haven't been listening. Appalachia bears some unique burdens, but the burden of being made fun of is not one.

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