vol 9 issue 5
Readers, OK, so… I was wrong about the Booker. I don’t totally understand how a novel can win the Pulitzer Prize and the Women’s Prize, and not be considered one of the thirteen best of the year, but that’s just one of many reasons I’m not on the Booker panel. (BTW, if you haven’t seen the longlist, here’s a fun (slightly chaotic) way to learn what’s included.)
How did you get on this week? For my money this was the most consistently downer week of reading that we’ve had (this year). Even when things have been bad for Demon in the past, there were always bright spots: kind people; hope for change. Caught in the grip of opiate addiction, and surrounded by people likewise ensnared and/or enabling that addiction, this portion of Demon’s story has felt to me like a long, slow slide from which it’s increasingly difficult to see a climb back up.
Related, it felt to me this week that the widening of aperture we noted earlier, continued to be the case. Increasingly this has become a novel principally concerned with the endemic abuse of opiates, and the ways in which it is related to a marginalisation of whole communities of people. Though she continues to present this material through Demon’s eyes (and in his endearing voice), I’ve been deeply impressed with the way in which Kingsolver has gone about this task of situating the crisis of fentanyl and OxyContin addiction in a socio-economic context, and showing that in a geographic and historical context. It seems clear now that this was the project of the novel, and making it a bildungsroman modelled after Dickens is a masterful frame in which to conduct it.
As such, I want to give a little more prominence this week to some related materials, rather than relegating them to the closing bullet points. By now you’re tired of my recommending the limited series adaptation of Dopesick, but I feel compelled to mention it once more — it’s available on Disney+ in the UK, and Hulu in the US (results local to you may vary). In addition, a couple of pieces of reporting from just this week: this New York Times piece on the current shape of the fentanyl crisis in Portland, Oregan (geographically at least, about as far from Virginia as you can get in the continental US); and a podcast series from the NYT & Serial: The Retrievals, which tells a related story in Connecticut (NB it’s not for the faint of heart).
Finally, but certainly not least, an anecdote from one of our fellow readers — KS, whom you may remember is a Colorado-based narcotics detective:
I interviewed a lady the other day who was just a couple of years younger than me (maybe mid-40s). She used to be a registered nurse. She got sick and resisted taking opiates for a year, but then broke down and started using the medication. Eventually, some medication led to more medication, and that led to different types of medication. Eventually, that led to heroin… and then to fentanyl.
This lady has a $400 a day drug addiction, which she spends all day every day shoplifting to support. In 12 years, she had lost her job, her career, her family, her house, and her dignity (she was sleeping with her 400 pound drug dealer for drugs). When I spoke to her, she was on the down slope of the fentanyl high, which is very short lasting. She was just a normal person. An intelligent person. A really easy person to talk to. She was also very aware of everything which had happened in her life and everything which had gone wrong. She was extremely self-aware about her addiction. It was heartbreaking.
I asked her if she was aware she is playing ‘Russian roulette’ with every single fentanyl pill she smokes (as she risks overdosing, because the counterfeit pill makers can’t monitor the amount of fentanyl which goes into each pill as it is so minuscule). She was fully aware. She said she knows any pill could be her last.
I think Kingsolver does a remarkable job of showing how someone who is given every opportunity to succeed, as well as those who aren’t, can fall into this kind of situation.
I can’t thank KS enough for this insight, heartbreaking as it is. And I also couldn’t agree more with their final point: that Kingsolver is doing something really special in bringing to life a touching story, that asks above all else for compassion. If you like Demon, as you watch him struggle with addiction, you cannot help but empathise with the plight of the addicted. If you’ve not personally known someone who has struggled with something like this, there is perhaps no more effective way of engendering empathy and understanding. This, after all, is the power of art: the ability to transport its audience to new contexts, and allow them insight into other lives, hearts, and minds, which might otherwise remain entirely foreign.
And how did Kingsolver accomplish that in this week’s section of Demon Copperhead?
A couple of issues ago, we talked about Demon’s progress from childhood to adulthood. Since then, in his own mind at least, he seems to have crossed that particular Rubicon. Or, as he puts it: ‘going over the adulthood cliff’ (p401). He’s used similar phrasing before with respect to the intractableness of being labelled a ‘loser’ (p158). There’s something interesting here about Demon’s psychology around the idea of natural progression, versus the feeling of stuck-ness he associates with his lot in life. In both cases, there is a sense of his being subjected to forces outside of his own control: biology, time, the will and opinions of others, and — as Kingsolver has teased out over the previous weeks — the wider context of the time and place in which he ‘got myself born’ (p1).
To the extent that he has constructed a framework for understanding his circumstances, he often seems to phrase it in terms of the problem of ‘wanting’. Here’s a passage from a little earlier in the novel, which was the first time I remember this way of thinking coalescing in Demon’s narration:
I was born to wish for more than I can have. No little fishing hole for Demon, he wants the whole ocean. And on from there, as regards the man-overboard. I came late to getting my brain around the problem of me, and still yet might not have. The telling of this tale is supposed to make it come clear. It’s a disease, a lot of people tell you that now, be they the crushed souls under repair at NA meetings or the doctors in buttoned-up sweaters. Fair enough. But where did it come from, this wanting disease? From how I got born, or the ones that made me, or the crowd I ran with later? Everybody warns about bad influences, but it’s these things already inside you that are going to take you down. The restlessness in your gut, like tomcats gone stupid with their blood feuds, prowling around in the moon-dead dark. The hopeless wishes that won’t quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and love you, and stay. Or could say to your mirror, same reason.
Some people never want like that, no reaching for the bottle, the needle, the dangerous pretty face, all the wrong stars. What words can I write here for those eyes to see and believe? For the lucky, it’s simple. Like the song says, this little light of mine. Don’t let Satan blow it out. Look farther down the pipe, see what’s coming. Ignore the damn tomcats. Quit the dope. (p281)
I think there are two things at play here: human desires (for better, for different, for more), and addiction. To the extent that a relationship is suggested between these two things, I think it’s a misreading on Demon’s part to conceive of it as a causal one. This is a tricky knot to unpick, but let’s give it a shot. Powerless as he feels, Demon is grasping here for someone else to blame: his mother, his friends? But he’s looking for a culprit on whom to pin the very fact that he wants ‘more than I can have’. By extension, in his case, he conceives that this addiction is a symptom of this unquenchable desire. In his schema, the world is divided into those who want too much, and those who ‘never want like that’. But this is too neat a distinction to draw. Wanting, desiring, compulsion — these things are a spectrum, not a binary. And I think some part of Demon understands the universality of the experience of wanting in varied degrees. Of the poverty of his youth alongside Maggot, at one point he thinks:
his poor grandparents that married at fifteen with no bigger hope in the world than to have kids and not watch them die. Us though, give us the fucking world. We pretended we were as good as the Bettina Cook kids, while Bettina pretended to be a Kardashian. (p376-7)
This begs the question: are the Kardashians a model of perfect contentment? I’ve not watched a single minute of the ‘reality’ TV show for which the family are famous (I know of at least one amongst us who is better researched in this regard, and will correct me if I’m wrong), but I’m willing to bet that they too are motivated by desires, rational or otherwise. If Demon was to cross paths with a member of rural Virginia’s (small, but not non-existent) Buddhist population, they might tell him that duḥkha is a universal experience: that wanting is the root of all suffering in this life. The leap that Demon takes in the passage quoted above, from seeking a cause for his wanting, to seeking a cause for his addiction, elides a complicated step he’s not yet able to conceive. If wanting is universal, and addiction a heightened state of wanting, there remains the question of why Demon’s wanting expresses itself as it does. Why is it that he grew up wanting ‘the whole ocean’, and eventually turned to substituting that desire for an addiction to opiates? After all, as Demon himself puts it ‘People find more ways to shut up their monsters than a Bible has verses’. (p368) Why then, are so many people he knows caught in this particular trap, regardless of where they started:
Emmy and Maggot, even though they were taken in by others and raised up right. I’d had some of the same kindness, the Peggots, Miss Betsy, Coach. And Fast Forward’s story, the same. Many had tried their best with us, but we came out of too-hungry mothers. Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts. (p.385)
Here again, Demon reaches to pin the blame on the mothers who bore these future drug abusers. (‘Kid born to a junkie is a junkie’ (p.2)) But, if we read between the lines of Demon’s grasping for someone else to blame, we see that he is doing so because he fears that the alternative is that he himself is to blame. He’s yet to begin internalising Mr Anderson’s lessons about the greater powers at play that have shaped his circumstances: governments, movements, actual revolutions, and industries with profit motives. It’s a lesson June is still pleading with him to learn on the final page of this week’s reading:
The first thing we had to do, she said, was quit thinking this mess was our fault. “They did this to you,” she kept repeating, like that was our key to salvation. (p455-6)
Demon is honest about his desire, but we see that he is also ashamed of it, because of the mode in which it has come to be expressed. Whether it’s the ‘crushed souls’ and doctors telling him “it’s a disease”, or June telling him “They did this to you”, it doesn’t feel as though Demon is ready to hear it yet.
Having witnessed the action of this week’s section, I think most readers likely enter the final portion of the novel with a heavy heart. Dori’s pregnancy, which Demon briefly holds out hope might be reason enough for them both to get clean, feels unlikely to deliver the miracle of sobriety to them. Sadly, it feels more likely at this point, that Dori is set to become — in Demon’s eyes and words — another ‘too hungry mother’. If so, will the child’s father consider it doomed from birth to repeat its parents’ mistakes?
I had a couple of other things earmarked to discuss this week, but I have rambled and run out of space / time. Before I sign off, however, I do want to highlight a pair of passages from across the last two weeks of reading. Both inspired me to go wild with the highlighter because I think they are amongst the most poetically phrased of the text thus far. Taken together, however, I think they lend a valuable insight to Demon’s changing mindset as he has descended into addiction.
The first comes when Demon finds himself alone at the Independence Day party at Emmy’s house:
I had myself a moment there, against a poplar trunk, in the woods where once on a time I was happy. Fat trees with fat green leaves, fat boomer squirrels full up with the fat of the land. July being God’s month. And the end of the road for my dad. I’d spent so many Fourths mad at Mom for being a killjoy, without thinking of the man that gave me life, signing off from his. Never taking a minute to count up all I’d seen, that he never got to see. Yes, life sucks, hungry nights and hurtful people, but compared to buried in a box, floating in a universe of nothing and never? I wouldn’t trade. I watched a pinwheel of green fire swirl up over the treetops throwing white sparks. My dad, mom, and little brother were missing out on a lot of amazing shit. (p313)
What a beautiful paragraph. There’s a push-and-pull within it, between life & death, but this is a moment in which life is victorious. Demon is inspired to feel the joyous gift of living, and getting to experience these sensations and spectacles that so many close to him no longer can. Compare it to this later moment, in which death is again on Demon’s mind, this time the death of Dori’s father:
Vester died in dogwood winter. April, the month of the whole sorry world praying for deliverance, with dogwoods and redbuds all pretty on the roadsides and new green leaves lighting up the mountains. Then comes a late freeze to turn it all black, every fruit of the year killed in the bud. It’s a fitting time to die, I reckon. If you’re past believing in deliverance. (p395)
The same tug-of-war is present here, but this time it’s death that has the upper hand. It is Demon’s inclination to believe, at this point, that all hope of rejuvenation is false hope — that escape from the downward spiral will not be forthcoming.
Fun stuff! What was it that MB-M said back in issue 1? ‘[A] delightfully happy summer tale full of joyful children enjoying the innocence of youth’. I mean, if you have any hope left at this point that things will turn out somewhere in the vicinity of OK, you’re probably a foolish, misguided optimist. And that makes two of us.
I’ll see you back here next Sunday, to discuss the rest of Demon Copperhead.
✌🏻
— Adam
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