vol 9 issue 4
Readers, as we venture into the second half of the novel, how did you find this week’s section of Demon Copperhead? I feel as though, on one hand, things have settled a little for Demon: he’s no longer being passed from pillar to post, and one temporary situation to another. Much as he might (unfoundedly) fear that Coach will get rid of him as soon as his injury reduces his effectiveness on the football field, he has at least been living in the same home for the duration of this week’s pages, and with people who genuinely care about him. On the other hand, you could argue that things have worsened. Demon now finds himself more-or-less surrounded by the blight that is gripping his community. Acquaintances, medical professionals, and love interests are all pushing opiates at him. Coupled with a serious injury bursting the bubble on his newfound, surprise fame, and Demon is being exposed to the realities of (near-)adult life in a place where times are hard, and options are few.
I’m not going to go on and on about identity this week, though hopefully you kept an eye out for related material during your reading. The etymology of ‘redneck’ (p279) was new to me — neat! And I felt the sting of Demon’s admission that ‘I wasn’t sure anymore how I fit into the Peggot situation’ (p286) — a clear sign that his innocence is abandoning him, and he’s still yet to find a place he feels as though he truly belongs. So it goes with Maggot: ‘Just trying out being a different type person’ (p287) — a common aspect of adolescence, but your heart’s stonier than mine if you didn’t balk at the distance that has grown between two former friends, both simply struggling to find their places in the world.
I asked, last week, for folks to send me some of their favourite language from the novel. Many were kind enough to do so, and I’ve picked a few to look at. Let’s get to it.
IM highlighted a passage from Demon’s mother’s funeral:
What I had felt at the Peggot house with the too-quiet cousins wasn’t wrong: I was a strange new being, turned overnight. Creaky liked to call us orphan boys, and I always felt proud inside for not actually being one. So that was me doing the same, building the wall with me still on the lucky side. Now I’d gone over to the side of pitiful, and you never saw a kid so wrecked. (p110)
This is a moment in which Demon is resigning himself to a new sense of himself. The powerlessness is heartbreakingly rendered by Kingsolver. First Demon recollects himself as outnumbered in the presence of ‘the too-quiet cousins’, and in relaying the change in his circumstances he seems so sad to find himself ‘a strange new being’. The change was not of his own making. His admission of having secretly kept the candle burning of his non-orphan status all throughout his experience at Creaky’s tugs at the heartstrings. We can imagine Demon, in the quiet, lonely times in that terrible place, holding tight to the idea that he was not the same as Tommy and Swap-Out: that somehow the technicality of his having a living mother surely augured a brighter future than was the case for those forlorn boys. This keeping hope alive he does state actively: ‘building the wall with me still on the lucky side’ is something he chose to do. It was meaningful to him, that metaphor. But despite his best efforts, fate has torn the illusion asunder. The particular inclusion of the word ‘kid’ in that final clause is so powerful. As little as we might currently know about Demon’s position as narrator, we know that he’s an adult looking back on these events. As such, the phrase ‘you never saw a kid so wrecked’ reads as delicately balanced between crying out for help, whilst admitting it’s too late.
IM’s email also noted a couple of turns of phrase: ‘conniptions and walleyed fits’ (p145). I love the way that Kingsolver peppers idiom like this throughout Demon’s narration, I think we can all agree that it makes the novel more captivating, and the character more endearing. The latter of these particular phrases reminded me of something from the very first novel we read together, in 2014. Those who were along for the ride through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest may recall ‘the howling fantods’.
AB wrote in to call out a passage that I had also highlighted. With reference to his mother’s death, Demon says to Angus at one point:
“It’s more like this bag of gravel I’m hauling around every day of the year. If somebody else brings it up, honestly, I’m glad of it. Like just for that minute they can help me drag the gravel.” (p246)
As AB puts it: ‘It broke my heart a little bit, and feels like a very true description of the weight of grief. And also perhaps a good reminder not to avoid talking about hard, heavy things.’ I can’t do any better than that. I do love how Kingsolver (via Demon) roots this simile in base, physical reality. Even if we’ve not handled a bag of gravel, we can imagine the heft of it. And it’s very specifically not a bag of sand (with which we might have some positive connotation of beaches and sun; something with which you might build), but gravel: a substance we all know but which no one enjoys walking on, or driving over. Gravel is the source of stones in your shoes and chips in your windscreen. No one likes it, but it feels almost elemental: countless hard little stones, adding up to a mighty burden.
From our vantage point in the novel we might consider that this particular simile also has a couple of parallels. First there is the work that Demon gets at the farm supply store, lugging around 50lb bags of cattle feed. This is an activity Demon has chosen, and its one which helps others. Physically strong as he is by this time, it’s also one to which he is suited. In these respects, it’s the mirror image of the emotional weight that he continues to bare, and which his strength does nothing to lighten.
Secondly, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Kingsolver has employed the same simile in a different context, earlier in the novel. When we’re first introduced to OxyContin in the book, Demon’s limited understanding is that it’s:
God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. (p112)
Here the same phrase is being used to denote less weight, and more friction. And yet it works in both senses, particularly once we see the path that Demon has begun to head down this week with respect to opioid use. Whether it’s the emotional burden of grief, or the physical toll of chronic injury, opioids are readily offered up as an escape hatch.
SvR sent this note: ‘Loved the staccato of the language at the beginning of chapter 41. It was like the rhythm of a heart beating either in anticipation of something great, or, sadly, something very bad.’
I also liked those opening paragraphs of chapter 41 very much. Take, for example, the first couplet:
Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told.
This brief moment offers a glimpse into narrator-Demon’s world to which I don’t think we’ve heretofore been privy. In the first sentence he is still questioning the cause and effect of his own narrative. This tells us that, even in his adulthood, whilst telling his own story, he does not claim to completely understand it. I found this to be somewhat reminiscent of the opening of Dickens’ novel:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. (Dickens p13)
The latter half of that Kingsolver couplet, however, is perhaps even more interesting. It tells us — I believe for the first time — that writing about his life is something that has been suggested to Demon by someone else. We might even guess the circumstances under which this has come about. The fourth of many substance-abuse recovery programmes’ steps (pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous) is to ‘make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves’. The fact that Demon is writing his own story for a purpose is of interest. The fact — betrayed by that simple ‘I’m told’ at the end — that he’s unsure whether he believes in that purpose, I find fascinating. (As an experiment, with the above in mind, go back and re-read the opening two paragraphs of chapter 36.) To my mind it gives us something further to hope for at the end of the novel: not just that Demon survives those hardships that he has already faced, and those yet to come, but also that through the very act of telling his story, he is able to find some peace. Perhaps that he is able to tear a hole in that bag of gravel, such that with each step forward his load lightens.
A couple more picks from me, and they’re kinda-sorta related. First, another heartbreaking, beautiful passage that employs metaphor, and then grows out of it, into a series of real-world images.
To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn. (p280)
First, ‘the dark mess of our little skull closets’ is a wonderful turn of phrase, but it also captures all the weird, lonely isolation of youth, trying to figure out bigger things than you can fully understand. Then, the trio of images Kingsolver raises effortlessly in the space of 33 words. We can see them vividly, like a set of dioramas. Tragedies frozen in single images. The feelings of stuck-ness, helplessness, and disappointment that each contains is palpable. They are powerfully pathetic in the sense of kindling in the reader a feeling of compassion towards, and sadness on the behalf of, their subjects. As a trio in quick succession, they serve as a snapshot of (and a shorthand for) Lee County, which is only effective because Kingsolver has elsewhere gone to pains to render its specifics in colour.
And, and, and, let’s close as we opened this section: at a funeral. This time, good old Mr. Peg’s:
The whole idea of the sermon was how people connect up in various ways, seen and unseen, and that Mr. Peg had tied a lot of knots in the big minnow seine that keeps us all together. (p359)
More metaphor, injected here with more specific vernacular (a minnow seine is a type of fishing net with which Mr. Peg would have been familiar). The idea of a community being nothing more complicated than people tied together is quite beautiful. It gets at the fragility of community, which I think is something that Kingsolver is interested in here, but also the tenacity of the human spirit: each of those knots requiring tying by hand, occurring no other way than via human will. That the net ‘keeps us all together’ is, in this context, an unalloyed good. It is not a constriction, to be kept in this way. To be part of a strong, un-frayed community is something to aspire to. And with that aspiration comes the acknowledgement that the knots must be tied by hand.
Before I sign off for the week, I’d like to “thank” those of you who wrote to share your own broken limb stories, and extra points to the person who included gruesome x-rays! I’ll not share those with the group, but I do have a couple of resources to pass on:
• BS sent a link to a 2001 documentary about Melungeons
• and MC passed on this recent article about the US’s ongoing fentanyl crisis
My thanks to them, and to everyone who dropped me a line to let me know how they’re getting on with the book.
That’s all for this issue. Look out for the longlist for this year’s Booker Prize, which will be announced on Tuesday (1 Aug). I expect to see Demon Copperhead on there, so get ready to start telling your friends how you’ve read (most of) the Kingsolver, and you think it’ll win. (FWIW, I’m also anticipating spots on the list for Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood; Catherine Lacy’s Biography of X; Salman Rushdie’s Victory City; and possibly John Banville’s The Singularities.)
Enjoy the week. I’ll write to you again next Sunday, to discuss the novel up to the end of Chapter 54.
✌🏻
— Adam
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