vol 9 issue 2

Readers, first of all, some housekeeping. One thing I learned last week (in my ninth year of doing this) is that footnotes don’t really work in emails. Apologies for all the scrolling; I will henceforth avoid using them to the extent possible. (FWIW, things look pretty good in the online archive version.)

I’m behind on my Dickens! Like, ~100 pages behind. It’s not the worst thing in the world, because the two novels have diverged wildly in pace this week, and not in the way that I might have expected. I’m through 17 chapters of David Copperfield, and feel as though a few more twists and turns have been endured than has been the case in the Kingsolver. That’s not to say that things haven’t moved forwards in Demon Copperhead, they certainly have, and to a large extent I’m still finding it fascinating to see where the two novels overlap, and where they depart from one another.

But, the explicit inspiration for Kingsolver’s novel is not the only book to which it has drawn comparisons this week. EE likened the way this early part of the plot is developing to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (which we read together in 2019), and I think that’s also what MB-M is driving at, through a thick blizzard of sarcasm, here:

Adam, thanks for once again choosing a delightfully happy summer tale full of joyful children enjoying the innocence of youth in a safe and loving environment… 😉

I suppose they could just as easily have been referring to Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Sipped Ink pick in 2016), so the point is well taken. Also, IM had another comparison:

The book that it reminded me of from very early on is Shuggie Bain by Dougie Stuart. The mothers are similar in their addictions and attractions to unsuitable men; the sons at such pains to try to help and protect their damaged mums. The way Kingsolver and Stuart write about the unsuitable men is quietly terrifying and I read with a grimace and a furrowed brow! I do hope DC is not quite as downbeat as Shuggie Bain (although it was a great read).

I’ve not read Douglas Stuart’s 2020 Booker winner, and I’m not sure whether this makes it more or less likely that I will.

Whilst we’re doing these, not a direct comparison, but a note from CS:

Thank you for introducing me to the work of Barbara Kingsolver whose name I knew but have never read. She has a beautiful writing style and I am a sucker for novels in the first person - Catcher in the Rye, Rebecca, The Bell Jar, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Demon is an incredibly vulnerable, resilient, bright and funny kid on the edge of life but a survivor, I hope you are right and things do turn out right for him.

CS raises an excellent point (and lists a couple of my all-time favourite novels): isn’t it impossible to conceive of Demon Copperhead as written in the third person? It would be an entirely different novel, and I can only think that it would be lacking some of the empathic magic that Demon’s perspective brings. (Perhaps not coincidentally, David Copperfield was the first of Dickens’s works to be written entirely in first-person. (Dickens, p.xx).)

Before we get into notes on this week’s chunk of text, we have another matter to attend to — a linguistic / geographic correction from BS:

I felt compelled to make one extremely minor correction: Demon isn’t speaking in “West Virginian vernacular” or in a West Virginian accent — he’s in the southwestern part of Virginia. Lee County is bordered to the north by Kentucky and to the South by Tennessee (notably, Tazewell County that Mr Creaky seems so fond of, is a touch further east and bordered by West Virginia to the north. In my experience, a lot of folks in this part of Virginia think of West Virginia kind of the way Mr. Creaky thinks of Tazewell County — maybe, at least subconsciously, thanks to the history of the split of the state in two). They’re awfully close, but I thought it’s an important enough distinction (at least to folks in the area; my wife grew up in Clintwood, Virginia, and moved to Norton to get her first grown-up apartment, just like Ms. Barks) to point it out.

My sincere thanks to BS for the input. I imagine that they are quite correct: these distinctions may seem slight to those of us on foreign soil, but to folks in the area, to Kingsolver, and to her characters, these things matter a great deal. So, Lee County is not in West Virginia. It’s in the west of Virginia — which is a different state (nay, Commonwealth) — and is in fact further west, in Virginia, than any part of West Virginia, which is to the north-east. OK? OK.

No word on whether “dead fit” was in common use by Virginians of any stripe in the 90s. But, eagle-eyed readers will have spotted Demon’s description of a ‘loudness war’ between the girls of the McCobb household where he’s staying. The combatants: ‘Lion King and Spice Girls’ (p141)!

OK, on to the notes. This week I found myself concentrating on one theme that I think is being braided together by Kingsolver out of a couple of different strands in the text. Depending on how large an umbrella we wish to employ, we might consider this theme to be that of ‘identity’.

We touched on this last week, raising the question of who gets to decide who you are. Who has the power to apply labels, and assign you to categories? And how hard is it to escape those things once you find yourself there?

Demon’s narration indicates that he is well-acquainted with the stickiness of these distinctions. He expends a great deal of energy, and is deeply emotionally invested, in trying to make sure that he is not so permanently marked out. ‘Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over’ (p158) he thinks at one key point, desperate to halt his own advance towards that precipice. This occurs at a pivotal moment for Demon, in which he lets his anger and frustration boil over, punching the dashboard of Mrs. McCobb’s car. Most readers, I believe, will find his actions justified and relatable — such is the dire circumstance in which he is persisting at that time — but Demon quickly expresses shame at having acted this way. He also, some chapters later, cites the incident again, indicating that it has played on his mind.

And it’s not new to him. Consider also the way in which he begins chapter 19:

I was the person not invited at June’s house. That feeling hangs on you like a smell. I had put showers between myself and Creaky’s barn, but this is not something that washes off. You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice. (p128)

Here, Demon is generalising a specific instance of feeling unwelcome, into a pervasive sense of lacking belonging. We can see how he has come to this conclusion, having been uprooted several times already, and having found himself in successive unenviable circumstances.

What is new to Demon in the incident in Mrs. McCobb’s car, is the extent to which he externalises his anger. The anger itself has been with him for some time. Take, for example, a passage toward the beginning of this week’s reading, in which Demon ponders what he — from his narrative vantage in the future — might say to his young self.

If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes that I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid […] and tell him: You think you’re giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you. But I would be wasting my shot, because the kid was in no mood to hear it. I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together. (p109)

Righteous anger is (perhaps understandably) a staple of Demon’s psychological make-up at this point. Kingsolver’s choice to include this expression of a desire on her narrator’s part, to intercede in the path of his youth, may prove telling. We might read into it that the older Demon finds himself in a better place, such that he wishes to console his younger self, ahead of whom so many trials yet remain. But the nature of the imagined intervention is interesting too: the older Demon both desiring to council against the anger contained within his young self, and simultaneously understanding it: empathising with himself across a divide of years. If we want to be really brave, we could speculate that this inclusion indicates that an important part of the journey between these two Demons is learning to transcend the anger engendered by the circumstances of his youth. At one point young Demon notes that ’there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning’ (p112), to which we might add: nor happiness, nor peace, nor anger.

Though he has internalised this notion of constant change — and perhaps because he has — a sense of the future is not something that comes clearly to the young Demon. Occasionally, a remark reveals the extent to which he is too busy managing the particular circumstances of his days, to expend energy musing on what might be further ahead.

‘You and Matty will be teenagers here before you know it’ Mrs. Peggot says to him at one point, causing Demon to reflect that he’d ‘given no thought to what lay up the road for us’ (p.137). In truth, how could we expect anything different from a young boy who has known nothing but struggle and upheaval? We have witnessed the small shocks Demon has undergone as he’s learned of other ways of living: urban life with its kerbside garbage collection, and life amongst the garbage in the India of Mr. Ghali’s childhood. Neither is more foreign to Demon than the other, so relatively narrow are his experiences to date, and so preoccupied he’s been with merely surviving them.

So, Demon has a strong sense that in the present (of his youth) he is indelibly marked as inferior. And, unable to imagine much of a future for himself, he fears that this classification is something he will never escape. The exact nature of his imagined stigma is something he doesn’t fully understand. When lamenting that there probably did exist foster parents of the compassionate, non-exploitative kind, but ‘they didn’t take kids like me’. Emmy asks him to define his terms:

“What do you mean, kids like you?” I shrugged. “I don’t know.” (p125)

In so far as he is able to locate the genesis of his condition, he has the instinct that it has something to do with his mother. We have already noted this train of thought (‘Kid born to the junkie is a junkie’ p2), and it recurs this week with the added complication that his mother’s death now seemingly renders the equation settled:

If you think a mother is a hard rock to run up against, try pushing back on a dead one. (p114)

Particularly in this stage of his life, Demon places great stock in what others think of him. He has good reason for doing so, given that his wellbeing is consequent upon remaining, if not well-liked, at least useful enough to be tolerated. With respect to Creaky, the McCobbs, Ghost, and so on, Demon measures his self-worth against the opinions of others, and the way that they treat him.

There are indications however, that Demon has begun to conceive of himself as no longer (entirely) a child, in some important sense. His reason for a period of relative stoicism in his post-dashboard punching / pre-running away relationship with Mrs. McCobb is framed thus:

The idea of people wanting at all times to hear your problems, that’s a child thing. (p145)

Around this same time, he has also relayed his feelings for Emmy (both emotional and physical) as a demarcating line between ‘kid shit’ and ‘[n]ot kid shit’ (p.132) Different as they are, both of these cases involve Demon’s feelings about others (as opposed to their feelings about him, imagined or otherwise). Perhaps there is a sense of his equating a widening and deepening of his emotional palette with a burgeoning maturity. If so, we can see why the incident of his losing his temper in Mrs. McCobb’s car remains a fresh source of shame for him. It is a moment in which Demon — a boy who has little control over anything in his life, excepting the way he conducts himself — allows his reason to be overpowered by emotion. We as readers — like the older version of Demon quoted above — may have sympathy for the extent to which persistent anger acts as a much-needed touchstone for young Demon: something consistent upon which he can rely. But as a boy, he is ashamed (and perhaps afraid) of displaying it.

Another such incident closes our week’s reading. In the face of the gross injustice visited upon him by the OxyContin-addicted woman, and the Willie Nelson look-a-like shop-keeper, Demon vents his anger in an outburst at both of them. At first, reflexively ashamed, he makes some attempt to disassociate himself from his actions in the heat of the moment.

Where the screaming is coming from, who knows, it doesn’t feel like me telling this guy he’s a Nazi

But subsequently he owns his anger, and his actions.

I did that. With all the hate in my heart, I tell her to go ahead and die like my mom did. (p182)

Thus we leave Demon in a bad way: destitute and alone. What should we hope or fear for him from the facts, firstly that he has (even if temporarily) relinquished the suppression of his passionate feelings; and secondly, that he is — for perhaps the first time — moving forwards with some semblance of an idea for his future? He now walks a road that he has chosen, even if it is leading him towards someone he does not know.

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Before we wrap up for this issue, I want to share a couple of the reader photos you sent in. MC is enjoying some sunny lunch-break reading ☀️

And SvR is trying to one-up them, with a libation 🥂

My thanks to all who got in touch. I think I replied to everyone, but as I mentioned previously, I certainly read everything.

And that will do it for this week. See, no footnotes — sorry again about that formatting blunder. (If I had availed myself of a footnote, it would have been to recommend to anyone wanting a better understanding of the OxyContin crisis, the miniseries Dopesick, based on the book of the same title, by Beth Macy.) I wish you an enjoyable week’s reading. Will I make up the ~230 pages in the Dickens? There’s only one way to find out. I’ll catch you back here next Sunday, to discuss all things up to the end of chapter 34.

✌🏻

— Adam