An Appalachian elegy, hillbillies not included
Author re-imagines ‘David Copperfield,’ bringing humanity and humor to region
Most of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels begin with a question, usually involving an injustice: how to tell a story about America’s exploitation of developing countries, for example, or the effects of climate change on rural communities.
Her latest book began with the question of how to tell a story about the opioid epidemic that is ravaging Appalachia.
The answer came, she said, from a visitation by Charles Dickens. (More on that later. “I don’t usually talk to dead people,” she said.) The result of the conversation, her 17th novel in nearly three decades as a bestselling author, is the recently released “Demon Copperhead,” which re-imagines the hero of “David Copperfield” as a young man in contemporary Southern Appalachia.
Kingsolver is a child of the region, and a biologist with an intimate knowledge of and love for its unique ecosystem — its flora and its fauna, including the human kind. She is fiercely protective of its communities and irritated by the prejudice heaped on it. She had choice words for J.D. Vance. His 2016 bestseller, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was a bootstrapping memoir wrapped in a polemic Kingsolver found especially condescending.
In her book, Kingsolver slyly weaves the history of her home into Demon’s harrowing tale. From the Whiskey Rebellion to the boom and bust of the tobacco and coal industries, she describes a community preyed on for decades as governments and companies extracted their resources. And then came the opioid crisis. Everyone knows someone who has lost a friend to overdose, she said, or children who are being raised by someone other than their parents.
“We’re left with a generation of kids who’ve had their lives torn apart,” she said. “I wanted to say, ‘Look, it’s still here, and this got done to us, and we didn’t deserve it.’ ”
Kingsolver, 67, lives in a century-old farmhouse nestled in a hollow in the picturesque town of Meadowview, Virginia, with a population just shy of 1,000. It’s more than 200 miles from where she grew up in rural Kentucky, but it’s still Appalachia. The region stretches from New York to northern Mississippi, but its cultural identity, as Kingsolver pointed out, is most identified with a handful of states.
Kingsolver and her second husband, Steven Hopp, moved here with their two daughters full time 18 years ago. Hopp had bought the place years earlier, when he began teaching at Emory & Henry College, a liberal arts institution a few miles away.
But back to Dickens. Kingsolver was touring in England for her 2018 book, “Unsheltered,” when she discovered that Bleak House, where Dickens wrote much of “David Copperfield,” was a bed-and-breakfast. Who could resist? She and Hopp were the only guests at the cliffside mansion. Kingsolver settled into the study where Dickens had worked, while Hopp went to bed.
“I sat at his desk, and I just started communing with Dickens,” she said. “I thought about how ‘David Copperfield’ was his own story, and I’m thinking we’re in the same boat. I’m sure the polite Victorians did not want to hear about poorhouses and orphanages, and yet they were waiting each month for the next installment.”
She went on: “I asked him, ‘How do I do that?’ And he said: ‘Let the kid tell the story. No one doubts the child.’ It was really late, I got the willies, and I went back to the room where Steven was sleeping and said, ‘Hey, I just had this amazing conversation with Charles Dickens,’ and he said, ‘Did it end well?’ ”
It ended very well. Kingsolver spent the rest of the night writing. She saw her hero, a redheaded boy with green eyes whose nickname would be Copperhead (“Demon” came later, an inevitable schoolyard moniker since his given name was Damon). As with David Copperfield, the story of his life begins with his birth, in his case in a trailer to a hapless, precariously sober teenage mother. “Born in the mobile home,” Demon says later. “That’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.”
Kingsolver puts Demon through hell — the degradations of foster care, as he is taken in by a series of struggling families and one brutish farmer; and the stark realities of being a foster kid, always hungry, often dirty, trying to be invisible. Kingsolver said she knew firsthand Demon’s emotional landscape, particularly the humiliations of being a teenage outlander and the cruelty of your peers.
“She means to save us by telling us stories,” said novelist Ann Patchett. “She comes closer than anyone else I know. She’s able to tell us things we desperately need to know in a way that makes it possible for us to hear it.”
In “Demon Copperhead,” opioid addiction destroys Demon’s mother, then ensnares him, too. To understand an addict’s experience, Kingsolver contacted Art Van Zee, the Virginia physician who sounded an early alarm about the dangers of OxyContin and now treats recovering addicts. Van
Zee connected her with his patients, whose stories find their way into Demon’s. They taught Kingsolver what it feels it like to be dopesick, detailed the mechanics of the drug — how to shoot it up or inhale its vapor — and shared the heartbreaking economics, from pill mills to trap houses and prostitution.
Kingsolver gives Dickens a cameo in the novel: He’s required reading in one of Demon’s English classes. Books are mostly a time suck, Demon declares, but some authors held his interest. “Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Jesus Christ did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over.”
He concluded, “You’d think he was from around here.”