Demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver review: how not to update dickens

Jessa Crispin 09 October 2022 8:00am BST When people go Dickensian, it usually means they’ve written an unruly 600 page book they couldn’t manage to edit down. Or maybe it means they gave

their characters quirky names that reveal their true nature, a la Uriah Heap. Or they wanted to tackle a story about a social ill on a grand scale with a cast of ruffians, orphans, and

prigs. These are the stylistic tricks that are easy to replicate, even for middling writers. What’s difficult is to replicate Dickens’s big, soppy heart, and his ability to render complex

quandaries in ripping stories that make you read a thousand pages like you’re binge-watching 10 episodes of the latest Netflix hit. Barbara Kingsolver tries her best in her update of David

Copperfield, a 600-page monster called Demon Copperhead. Her literary production thus far has favoured massive, readable bestsellers about things like climate change, religious

fundamentalism, racism and the importance of family. So yes, she was eventually going to go do a Dickens, and for some reason she has called it Demon Copperhead. The narrator’s real name is

Damon Fields, but he prefers his titular playground nickname. Much like his 19th-century counterpart, Damon’s life is a series of misadventures through a world hostile to his existence, from

his birth to a single teenage mother on the bathroom floor of his trailer home, through the foster system and inadequate education and various jobs and caretakers and love interests, until

his emergence as a successful writer. Or in this case, an independent cartoonist. The book is very faithful to its source material, going chapter by chapter and beat by beat to line up with

Dickens’s original structure. In the abstract, it holds promise. The reason the story still has relevance is that the precarity, income inequality, and instability of a life’s trajectory in

industrialised Victorian England are all replicated in a post-industrial America. Kingsolver swaps out Suffolk for southern Appalachia, a region blighted by poverty and addiction. Instead of

being sent to work for a wine merchant, our young hero finds himself in a foster home run by a farmer who uses his wards as labourers. Kingsolver even replicates a moment of Dickens’s

foreshadowing, when the narrator gets ahead of himself talking about his first love, Em’ly in the original and Emmy here. And so on down the line, ticking boxes and changing names and

circumstances ever so slightly, so that it begins to feel as if she pasted the text of David Copperfield and worked mostly through the Find + Replace function. But one thing she apparently

decided to Ctrl-X were all the funny bits, perhaps to cut the word count down by a couple of hundred pages. Beset by earnestness, Demon Copperhead breaks the most important rule of working

in the Dickensian mode: you must show the reader a good time. David Copperfield is funny and tragic, absurd and painful. Just like living a life, especially a difficult one. Demon Copperhead

is only sad and glum, with every bad thing that happened in the original cranked up a bit. The boy’s mother couldn’t just be a simpleheaded child, she had to be an addict who dies of an

overdose. Emmy, too, is strung out on heroin and sexually violated, rather than seduced and abandoned. The implication is that, if the reader giggles even once, they won’t understand the

difficulty of poverty in an atomised America. What Demon Copperhead becomes, then, is less a retelling of David Copperfield and more a fictional restaging of politician JD Vance’s memoir of

a difficult Appalachian childhood, Hillbilly Elegy.The pulled-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative of how he struggled his way to success despite incompetent social workers, corrupt employers,

and being surrounded by fools and meth addicts, you half expect our protagonist to announce his candidacy for the United States Senate by the final chapter. There’s even a rant about being

referred to as “deplorables,” referring to Hillary Clinton’s infamous comment about the kinds of “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic” white people who supported Donald Trump for

president. This is less a novel, then, and more a political project, working hard to humanise a region where Kingsolver herself was born, and has lived for the past 20 years. But although

she has tried to give a substantial weightiness to her characters by casting them in a classic work, all she has done is burden them with bloat. ------------------------- _Demon Copperhead

is published by Faber at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit __Telegraph Books_