[ Dave Kellaway reviews Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Demon
Copperhead and reflects on her contribution to literary fiction. She
is one of the best living writers of the socially engaged novel.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BARBARA KINGSOLVER – MAKING THE INVISIBLE, VISIBLE  
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Dave Kellaway
December 7, 2022
Anti-Capitalist Reistance
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_ Dave Kellaway reviews Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Demon
Copperhead and reflects on her contribution to literary fiction. She
is one of the best living writers of the socially engaged novel. _

Photo credit: Evan-Kafka // Anti-Capitalist Reistance),

 

_My job is never to tell you want to think but to draw you into a
conversation and really invite you into a world where you have maybe
never walked before and when you have finished and put that life down
and come back into your own, you are different, you have felt
something for the theoretical other… for me that is a political
act_.

FROM AN INTERVIEW [[link removed]] ON
OPEN BOOK RADIO 4, NOVEMBER 2022

Demon Copperhead
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By Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins; 560 pages
October 18, 2022
Hardcover:  $32.50
ISBN: 9780063251922
ISBN 10: 0063251922

 

HarperCollins
 

Barbara Kingsolver is one of the best living writers of the socially
engaged novel. She is a feminist, an ecologist, and very critical of
big business and the military-industrial complex. Unlike many
novelists writing today, she tells the lives of working people in an
empathetic and political way. She follows in the footsteps of writers
like Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Steinbeck,
and Toni Morrison.

Inspired by a visit to Bleak House, a house where Dickens lived near
Broadstairs, Kent, and had written David Copperfield, she decided to
“outsource” her plot and many characters to Dickens’
masterpiece. She also adopted its structure: longish with short
chapters, with hooks at the end of each to nudge you into the next
chapter. It is narrated like “Copperfield” in the first person by
Demon. Even the names she uses for her characters are a call-out to
the ones in David Copperfield.

The novel tells the story of Copperhead from birth until adulthood.
Born an orphan to a single mother who is an addict, we follow the ups
and downs (a lot of downs!) of his life. In the Appalachian region of
Virginia, we live with the terrible inadequacies of the US foster and
adoption systems. It is a brutal for-profit system in which social
workers can become legal guardians without even knowing the
children’s names. Foster parents come forward to pick up the social
welfare check and/or to make use of cheap child labour. Kingsolver
might show us the misery, but it is not misery porn. She shows the
solidarity and goodness of what mainstream Americans often call the
“hillbillies” or “trailer trash.” Demon finally finds a good
placement where he feels better and becomes a successful high school
football star. Then injury strikes and he has to deal with the
medication…

‘You’re born with nothing you die with nothing but it’s amazing
how much you lose in between’ 
-from Demon Copperheadnone

Kingsolver has lived in the areas where her books are situated, and
her training as a biologist and her ecological commitment lead her to
be stunningly precise and beautifully vivid about the local natural
environment. In the head of Demon this is contrasted sharply with the
numbness and concrete ugliness of the city. His dream in the book is
to see the ocean.

In the BBC interview, the author says she was astonished when she
researched the data regarding adoption and opioid addiction in that
region. In some counties, 30 to 40% of children are not being raised
by their biological parents. Of course, this is linked to the high
opioid addiction rates, which mean many parents have died early.
Kingsolver, through the story of one character, shows the way
profitable corporations promote their drugs, feeding off the problems
of a deprived population. There is even a resale market where people
who can get prescriptions for more than they need sell them on to the
long lines of people waiting to get their drugs from the semi-corrupt
doctor surgeries.

A black teacher in Demon’s high school is used by the writer to fill
in the political and economic forces behind this crisis. We learn
about how the mining companies moved in, taking away their land, and
then moved out, leaving little but a damaged environment behind. There
was also some resistance and even some unity in the struggle with the
black community at one stage.

Demon (page 377) reflects on how his community is seen:

Show me that universe on TV or the movies. Mountain people, country
and farm people, we are nowhere to hell. It’s a situation being
invisible. You can get to the point of needing to make the loudest
possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

The writer takes you into another world, but it is not just
superficial observation and emotional connection. You learn about the
class forces and economic factors that create it. According to
Kingsolver in her BBC interview, there is continuity between the
social conditions of 19th-century England and modern-day America, such
as child labour for poor children or alcohol and drug addiction. She
makes socio-economic forces implicit, as she says:

I write about big scary things but through character and story and
craft.

Kingsolver has been criticised for being overly political and dealing
with big issues. She feels that this is often really about questioning
a woman’s right to tell this sort of story. We had the same
experience with visual artists. For centuries, women were permitted to
paint still-lifes or portraits, but history painting with the big
topics was out of bounds. As Kingsolver says, “men are raised to
have ambition and women are accused of it.”

In other books, she has treated the issues of feminist growth and
ecology in FLIGHT BEHAVIOUR
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Christian missionary projects and colonialism in the POISONWOOD BIBLE
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Her writing can also span historical periods. In LACUNA
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the events of the US depression, McCarthyism, and the last days of
Trotsky in Mexico with Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera. In Unsheltered,
the book goes back and forth between the lived experiences of the same
house. Today, a woman struggles with the US’s broken health system.
In the 19th century, a teacher is caught up in conflicts around
Darwinism. Kingsolver’s first novel, THE BEAN TREES
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took up the issue of so-called “illegal” Central American
migrants fleeing torture and repression along with the story of a
working-class single mother struggling to make her way.

Her commitment to action on ecology has resulted in non-fiction works.
One book, ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE: A YEAR OF FOOD LIFE
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recounts the life of her own family as they go back to live on a farm
in Virginia and grow their own food. She had written short stories and
poetry as well as op-ed pieces. She is one of a minority of writers
who deal seriously with rural communities.

Kingsolver was heavily criticised for an opinion piece in the Los
Angeles Time
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criticising the US bombing of Afghanistan in the wake of the September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. She received all sorts
of threats and denunciations. She wrote:

_We’ve answered one terrorist act with another, raining death on the
most war-scarred, terrified populace that ever crept to a doorway and
looked out.__ (…) I feel like I’m standing on a playground where
the little boys are all screaming at each other, ‘He started it!’
and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I
keep looking around for somebody’s mother to come on the scene
saying, ‘Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue
here. People are getting hurt.’_

One of her most successful books, Lacuna, which won the Orange Prize
for fiction, was partially written in response to that episode. She
wanted to show how falsehoods could damage or destroy people and how
powerful regimes can use them for political ends. Her comments could
aptly describe the Trump or Johnson style of politics, where the truth
is in short supply:

_It’s a fact of our culture that the loudest mouths get the most
airplay, and the loudmouths are saying now that in times of crisis it
is treasonous to question our leaders. Nonsense. That kind of thinking
let fascism grow out of the international depression of the 1930s._

FROM AN ARTICLE
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SCOTTISH HERALD 2009

Demon Copperhead is a great read, but I would recommend her other
books too. The Bean Trees, her first novel at 232 pages, is a good
one to start with.

_For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day,
who’ve lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose
caseworkers keep losing their files, or feel invisible, or wish they
were: this book is for you._

BARBARA KINGSOLVER, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, PAGE 548.

[_DAVE KELLAWAY is on the Editorial Board of Anti*Capitalist
Resistance, a member of Socialist Resistance, and Hackney and Stoke
Newington Labour Party, a contributor to International Viewpoint and
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontieres._]

* Barbara Kingsolver
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* Fiction
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* Novels
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* literature
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* Climate Crisis
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* Ecosocialism
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* socialism
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* global politics
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* Protest
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* Environmental Activism
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* poverty
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