vol 9 issue 6
Readers, we’re finished. What did you make of the end of Demon Copperhead? As is traditional with these final read-along newsletter instalments, I’m going to spend a little time discussing this week’s section of the novel, but we should also think a little about the book as a whole.
In my estimation, the scope of the action narrowed a little this week, with the text concentrating on bringing a close to Demon’s own journey through the novel. This is actually a common structure in literary fiction, sometimes called diamond-shape plotting: begin with a specific story; widen into discussion of larger themes; narrow to a close on the central narrative once more. I wouldn’t say that Demon Copperhead is amongst the most dramatic examples of this, but it was certainly noticeable to me — perhaps as a result of having broken the novel down into these six, weekly chunks — that Kingsolver was balancing between telling the story of a young man’s struggles, and using that story as a lens on wider issues. As I’ve written here before, I’ve been very impressed with the manner in which she has folded in a potted history of Appalachia; it’s truly a novel from which I’ve come away feeling as though I’ve gained a somewhat better sense of a place. I also think that Kingsolver has (following in Dickens’ footsteps) done a remarkable job of making the reader empathise with the disadvantaged: both Demon, and his wider community. As we’ve mentioned previously — and, as is confirmed by Kingsolver in the interviews linked below — her project for the novel is explicitly to generate sympathy and understanding: for those addicted to opiates as a direct result of corporate exploitation of their communities; for a generation of orphans growing up in an under-resourced social care system; but also for the people of Appalachia as a whole. Less sympathy and more understanding perhaps, in this latter case. But nevertheless, Kingsolver is a proud Appalachian whose work here is to show her people in a light different to that in which they are too often portrayed.
As far as Demon’s story is concerned, something I noticed as we drew towards a close, was an increased presence of the question of life vs death. I noted this thematic tension at the close of last week’s newsletter, quoting those two poetic passages that called upon the symbolism of the natural world, and showcased a shift in Demon’s mindset. Things felt more acutely pinned to Demon himself this week, beginning of course with him suffering further immensely personal losses. His has been a life in large part shaped by these catastrophic events, such that we find him at one point musing:
The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between. (p468)
These latest deaths seemed to me to bring Demon to an emotional place I’d not found him in previously. Some weeks ago, I noted the passage in which his older, narrating self imagines speaking with the younger incarnation. His estimation, you might recall, is that his words would fall on deaf ears, because his youth was characterised by a perpetual sense of anger. The injustices of his childhood — in large part also stemming from deaths (those of his parents) — give rise to this anger, which we might not consider healthy, but which we likely understand. This is the fuel that pushes Demon forward through multiple bad living circumstances, through hunger and poverty and loneliness. Late in the novel, physically weakened by injury and addiction, and psychologically weakened by the latter, Demon is changed. Of course he still feels anger at his circumstances, and as his eyes have been opened by the likes of Mr Anderson and Tommy, some of his anger is perhaps better directed than it had been in his youth. But the lot of the addict is to be driven by their addiction. There is less time for righteous anger when one’s every waking moment is occupied with thoughts of the next fix, and how to survive until such time as it can be procured.
Concomitantly, the process of recovery from addiction requires humility and acceptance. Kingsolver is at pains to show us that anyone, regardless of background, can fall into the trap that has ensnared Demon. And as such, no special pleading is offered to either the poor orphan or the star football player. Demon’s experiences through this process are refined into something quite simple: does he choose to live or die. Early in the week’s reading, signs point to his having chosen the latter.
I remembered rescuing Martha from this very porch, a lifetime ago, and wondered what became of her. June would be getting her straightened out, for sure. Maggot and I weren’t crossing our path with June if we could help it. (p474)
Here we observe as Demon admits to the possibility of recovery, before actively choosing to avoid it. It was one of the first moments in the text — coming at a particularly dark point in his life — where I detected what Freudian psychoanalytic theory might term Thanatos: the ‘death drive’. Not necessarily suicidality — and, unless I’m forgetting something, we aren’t privy to any explicitly suicidal ideation on Demon’s part — but a pull towards one’s own death. At one point, Demon says ‘After Dori was gone, I was chasing the big zero’ (p472). It’s possible to read this as a reference to the temporary oblivion of an opiate high, but it’s also possible to see it as a preference for death. A little later, when June is attempting to persuade him of the efficacy of treatment programmes that would substitute illicit opioids for alternatives that wouldn’t involve highs or lows, Demon stops short of ‘mentioning the part about wanting sum-total obliteration of your life’ (p498). This is somewhat clearer: Demon has lost so much, and so many, that he feels a pull to join them.
In this frame of mind he has taken to passing judgments. Following both of their deaths, his sad musing brings him to this way of thinking:
I knew Dori was where she needed to be. Hammer was not. (p488)
Which raises the question, of course, what of Demon himself? Is he where he needs to be? The most decisive factor in his calculating Dori’s & Hammer’s fates is almost certainly the former’s inescapable addiction. His opinion here seems to be that Hammer was a good person who had potential, and a life ahead of him; Dori — whilst someone he loved — he sees as too deeply compromised by her addiction. In this equation, death is the only solution that brings her any peace. The narration omits any explicit sense of how Demon might adjudge himself, but the reader can make an educated guess. There are hints peppered throughout this week’s reading that this question is on his mind. At the start of Chapter 60 he struggles with a ‘new kind of bad coming on’, which he cannot attribute entirely to his circumstances because ‘Out on my ass was the normal for me’ (p503). Taking account of his material situation, he concludes: ‘A guy could take this to mean that he ought to be dead’ (p504).
In this darkest of moments Demon recounts a desire ‘to grind my bones against this mountain till the body picked a side. Give up the ghost, or get back in there’ (p505). But, as Demon himself puts it (perhaps with a nod to the opening of David Copperfield), ‘What matters in a story is the heart of its hero’ (p495), and ultimately his survival or demise is not a choice that his body will make for him — it will be his will that determines his path. In this section of the novel, I felt Kingsolver laying bare the struggle in Demon’s heart as he looks for a reason to go on.
An early glimpse of relief comes from an invented conversation between Demon and Angus (whom we seem destined to close these newsletters out without having discussed enough). Thinking on her likely flight from Lee County towards a brighter future by way of college, he imagines her advice to him would be thus:
Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you’re on your own with your ghosts. You’re the ship, they’re the bottle. (p508)
That Demon has internalised the advice of his good friend to ‘trust the road’ (read perhaps: continue the journey) is the merest glint of brightness. It struck me however, that he has his metaphor the wrong way around. It is natural in this moment that Demon should consider himself the ship (abandoned, out of place, trapped) and his past / his ghosts the constraining bottle. Part of his journey towards health might be framed as recognising that he is larger than his past: it is contained within him, and not the other way around.
A little later, progress is clearer, and rendered by Kingsolver in the kind of nature metaphor we’ve highlighted previously: ‘some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow’ Demon says, whilst cautioning that ‘that thing’s going to be growing a long time before you notice’ (p515). The news of this evolution in thinking comes, of course, from the Demon whom has survived. Only in his position as narrator (from perhaps a decade ahead?) is he able to observe the fruits of agonisingly slow persistence: of progress made by trusting the road and growing the tree.
The very presence of this older, wiser, less-tortured Demon should give us hope. He’s been there all along, of course. But, perhaps understandably, the horrors of his story have overshadowed the fact that he has lived to tell it. Kingsolver and her narrator then, end the novel with twin hopes that feel like promises: Demon will finally get to see the ocean, and it will not swallow him up.
I enjoyed Demon Copperhead immensely, and if the messages I’ve received throughout the read-along are indicative, so have you. I sure hope so. If you’d like to spend a little more time thinking about the novel, I have some recommendations:
• An interview with Barbara Kingsolver on the Poured Over podcast.
I have one quibble with this conversation: relatively early on Kingsolver explains the way that she came to be inspired by Dickens to believe that a story about orphans, class, and poverty would be of interest to readers. Twenty minutes later, she’s recounting a conversation with her publisher on the occasion of an earlier work being translated into Japanese. Why, Kingsolver wonders aloud, would Japanese people want to read her Kentucky-set novel? The answer she receives — and which she seems to accept — is that “the rest of the world is interested in Americans”. Whether or not that might be true, I don’t think that it’s the reason for Kingsolver’s particularly American novels finding success outside of her homeland. Is it not more likely that she has already answered her own question? People are interested in people. Japanese will read about Kentucky for the same reason an Appalachian reads Dickens.
Another element of the interview I found interesting was Kingsolver’s admission that she had struggled in her early career to reconcile herself to writing about people different from her. She settles upon permitting herself to do so as long as it’s in the third person; she does not want to presume to represent others’ way of thinking. This raises the interesting question of Demon’s first-person narration. Despite all the ways in which they are different, presumably Kingsolver feels enough kinship with Demon to allow her to authentically inhabit his mind.
• Kingsolver’s appearance as an interviewee on Oprah’s Book Club, is fun enough, and includes more detail about her stay at Bleak House, and the inspiration / permission Charles Dickens’ ghost gave her!
• If you only have time for one of these, I’d recommend the interview on Ezra Klein’s podcast, which is more far-reaching and more interested in the larger socio-political, geographic, and historical topics at play in the novel.
Also, some non-Kingsolver, but related items:
• You may have noticed the question of Sackler / Purdue liability in the news again this week.
• IM wrote in to recommend an Oscar-winning 1976 documentary, Harlan County USA, available in full on YouTube.
• And I simply have to share these closing thoughts from CS:
The desire for Demon to see the Ocean gave me some hope and this was partly due to the final shot from a long standing favourite film of mine, Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups (1959) when Antoine Doinel, another troubled youth, runs away to the ocean which he has always wanted to see, he make it and the final shot is of him by the ocean. Using an optical effect, they zoom in on his face and hold it there, this image has remained with me ever since I saw the film as a teenager.
If you’re looking for ideas of what to read next, some options to consider:
• Beth Macy — Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis (2022)
• Patrick Radden Keefe — Empire of Pain (2021)
• Bobbie Anne Mason — Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), an award-winning collection of short stories set in rural Kentucky.
• Barbara Kingsolver — The Poisonwood Bible (1998), her previously best-known, award-winning novel.
That will tie a bow around it for another year. If you ever need it, you can find an archive of all read-along emails right here. Whether this was your first read-along or your ninth, thank you very much for joining in. Double thanks to everyone who sent a contribution, an update on their reading, or just a photo — it’s fun to know you’re out there, enjoying the book.
If you would like to stay connected, you can find me via zioibi.com, where I keep an online notebook. It’s also home to my other newsletter (sign up for free rambling), and my erstwhile podcast about decades-old film and music. Until next time, be well.
✌🏻
— Adam
⏎ Return to the