Demon Copperhead is said to be inspired by David Copperfield, a masterpiece I read a couple of years ago. I most definitely can see that inspiration iDemon Copperhead is said to be inspired by David Copperfield, a masterpiece I read a couple of years ago. I most definitely can see that inspiration in Kingsolver’s novel. I would be hesitant, however, to make any further comparisons because for me that puts a contemporary novel on shaky ground when setting it next to a classic, beloved book. I can somehow forgive Charles Dickens for his verbosity. After all, that was the vogue back in his day. David Copperfield was a series of installments, stretched out over a period of time. He didn’t get paid by the word but by installment; still, he had a lot of mouths to feed. Barbara Kingsolver, on the other hand, could have done with a lot less, and I would have been a much happier reader for it. That’s not to say that her points are less important than Dickens’ themes. She absolutely had good reason to share what she did here.
“That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.”
But this isn’t only about drugs and pharmaceutical companies and shady doctors taking advantage of a whole group of people. It’s also about the foster care system and how it fails those most in need of protection. It’s about the long reach of the coal mine owners and how their power reverberated across the years, affecting everything in these individual’s lives from wages to education to property and more. Someone should be held accountable, and that’s where I find Kingsolver’s work to be admirable, without a doubt. However, I still couldn’t get the author out of my head while reading this story - despite the fact it was supposedly told through a young boy-turned-young adult’s point of view. I’ve read and loved some of Kingsolver’s earlier work but have had difficulty with more of her “recent” work for the same reason. If I sense the writer sitting next to me on the couch while I read, I get a little cranky. I would much rather feel like his or her characters are having a nice heart to heart with me instead. And that brings me to another niggle - Demon’s “voice” throughout the book. I just couldn’t jibe with it. It got on my nerves A LOT!
“If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway.”
I don’t mind gritty but what I couldn’t quite wrap my head around was who on earth is speaking these words? Supposedly, this is Demon as a young boy at the start of the story (the above passage occurs on page 2). Is this a super savvy kid speaking? Or is it Demon as an old man looking back and narrating? Or is it Kingsolver trying really hard to create a voice she feels is authentic? I don’t know, honestly. But it happened over and over again to me throughout the 500+ pages. It's like nails on a chalkboard!
Okay, I’ll lay off the complaining now. This is, after all, a 3-star book in my mind so there has to be another good thing or two, right?! What I loved most were the strong women in Demon’s life. Without them, I’m afraid to imagine Demon’s fate. In these Appalachia stories, I’ve often found that the women are the ones holding down the fort. It’s their strength and perseverance in the face of adversity that forms a safety net for those they care for most. And I can see where these women equate to those in Dickens’ story as well. This makes for a bit of fun, but you surely don’t need to read his book to understand this one. It just adds another level perhaps. There’s even a passage in here where Demon nods to that famous work.
“I had to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books. Some of them though, I finished without meaning to… Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously older guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”
I’ll say that this is an important topic to explore. Personally, it would work better if it had been edited more thoroughly. Yes, a shorter story can still make a huge impact. I also think a non-fiction piece on the opioid crisis would be a lot more effective for me. I know they are out there, and I will explore that option more thoroughly. Now, would I have loved this more if Richard Armitage had been reading it to me as he did David Copperfield? Damn straight I would have!! He could have read another 500 pages of this one to me and I’d have been content.
“It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning.” ...more
“Voices were being raised against him. He was caught up in the crowd and the stink of their rags filled his nostrils. They grew seething and 4.5 stars
“Voices were being raised against him. He was caught up in the crowd and the stink of their rags filled his nostrils. They grew seething and more mutinous and he tried to hide among them but they knew him even in that pit of hopeless dark and fell upon him with howls of outrage.”
I’m certain I just spent the past few days in purgatory. Or maybe I was sent directly to Hell. Whatever you want to call it, I was immersed in something dark, violent, and deeply disturbing. It’s the stuff of nightmares. I loved every minute of it. I’m also absolutely sure this book deserves to be reread again in the future. A Bible would be a handy companion to this novel – or some prior knowledge of the stories contained within. There were loads of biblical allegories scattered throughout. That’s as far as my Bible know-how goes, however – the awareness is there but by no means am I well-versed in it. No matter, in the hands of a skilled writer like Cormac McCarthy, I was completely possessed.
“Dark little birds kept crossing the fields to the west like heralds of some coming dread.”
This is the story of two people on a journey. A sister in search of something lost and a brother in search of the sister. Sin holds fast to their ragged clothing and tattered boots. Judgment pursues and lurks around each corner. Along the way each sibling meets a number of grotesque figures. McCarthy is so remarkably proficient at drawing every single one of these and so sharp when it comes to writing dialogue, that they very well could have been sitting right in front of me. As luck would have it, they were not! I thought I had come across the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at one point, minus a rider. On second glance, I believe they were simply agents of the devil, meting out the most horrific justice to anyone who veered from the straight and narrow. Whoever they were, these three will be forever imprinted in both my slumbering and conscious mind.
“They wore the same clothes, sat in the same attitudes, endowed with a dream’s redundancy. Like revenants that reoccur in lands laid waste with fever: spectral, palpable as stone.”
I’m not going to tell you to read this; it’s wholly up to you to make that choice. This is bleak, grisly, unsettling and hopeless. It’s a troubling fable wrapped in wonderfully expressive language. You might have more questions than answers after finishing, but it sure is energizing to keep on thinking about this long after closing the book! McCarthy is a genius and I would grab another right away if I didn’t have some other promising stories waiting in the wings.
“Hard people makes hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.” ...more
“Now there was no movement of air except the unnatural breath of the trap doors opening and closing in the tunnels. The smell was like the in3.5 stars
“Now there was no movement of air except the unnatural breath of the trap doors opening and closing in the tunnels. The smell was like the inside of our coal stove, but damp and decaying. Ahead of us, lamps bobbed like monstrous lightning bugs. Here and there an arm swung free from the darkness and disappeared again. I felt the mountain hunkered over us, pressing down, and it was hard to breathe.”
I simply can’t imagine what it would have been like to work in the coal mines or to watch a loved one, a father, a husband or a son, disappear into that gaping hole in the earth, wondering if he would return that evening or be lost forever. This book opened my eyes to a period of time and a series of events that I’ve not previously given much thought to – the struggle of the coal miners and the labor disputes of the early 1900s in West Virginia. I’d never even heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, the largest labor uprising in U.S. history, when the exploited miners clashed with the ruthless and corrupt coal companies.
“American Coal Company owned our house. Richmond and Western Railroad owned our land.”
This story is told through the point of view of four different characters in alternating chapters - CJ Marcum, town mayor and activist; Rondal Lloyd, union organizer and part-time banjo picker; Carrie Bishop, nurse and lover of two men; and Rosa Angelelli, a Sicilian immigrant who loses most of her family to the mines. To be honest, I would have been happier with perhaps just two points of view, or even just one, to make the storytelling more fluid. Carrie Bishop won my heart – what a woman! We meet her as a young dreamer, a headstrong and passionate girl, wishing for a romance like the ones she reads about in her beloved novels.
“I see myself, waiting for Heathcliff, waiting for someone to come from outside, bearing with him both passion and menace. I knew he would come from the outside, because Daddy and Aunt Becka said I would never find a man on Scary Creek or Grapevine. I was too forward, they said, too stubborn.”
Well, she does eventually lose her heart, but to two different men, loving both at the same time… ahh… And it’s all so believable! But I digress; this is not a romance story! So don’t let me lead you astray. This book is full of the cruel mistreatment of the miners, starving families, child labor, tragic accidents, brutal violence, and gruesome death. The author does a superb job of highlighting the years of struggle to organize the miners into unions, which were a threat to the ultimate power of the coal companies. It was not safe to be spotted as a union man; your life and that of your family were in danger if you were discovered. Much of the organizing was done in secret.
The first section of the book was a bit slow-going, as the scene is set and characters are introduced. I almost lost interest, my mind being rather scattered this past month. Yet I was hopeful, mostly thanks to Carrie’s sections, that there was a good story to tell in there somewhere. And I was right. The middle section hooked me. I had to discover for myself the eventual outcome for these vibrant characters and oppressed mineworkers. The beauty of Kentucky, Carrie’s homeland, is beautifully described in contrast to the dreariness of the mines themselves. I was struck by the writing in many of her passages.
“You have seen old photographs, brown and sweet-looking, as though dipped in light molasses. My memories of the Homeplace in Kentucky are like that. Sweet, bittersweet.”
If you don’t know how the Battle of Blair Mountain ends, I won’t ruin the climax of the story for you. It is interesting to do a little research into the true events afterwards. It won’t be the first or the last time that underpaid, underprivileged workers will be taken advantage of by those with more money and power. Thanks to people like the ones in this story, however, there will be those with enough courage to fight for their rights and stand up for what they believe in. Without them, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
“I first began to understand what I have learned since, that there are forces in this world, principalities and powers, that wrench away the things that are loved, people and land, and return only exile.”...more
“The heat is lifting some now, so a little wind comes up from the creek and ruffles the hem of Ora Mae’s dress. It ruffles the leaves of the shade tre“The heat is lifting some now, so a little wind comes up from the creek and ruffles the hem of Ora Mae’s dress. It ruffles the leaves of the shade trees, sighing, rising stronger now up from the creek and blowing across the yard, it’s sighing up the holler toward Hoot Owl Mountain, moaning around the house. It has voices in it, and thunder coming…”
I finished this book a week ago, yet I feel as if I’m still plunked firmly in the Appalachian hill country of Virginia. Lee Smith is no stranger to those parts, and her remarkable skill at bringing the reader right into her settings is incomparable. These are her people, her family and friends, her ancestors. This may be a fictional story, but no doubt her characters are much like folks she’s known firsthand or those she’s heard about through the oral histories she’s been privy to as a daughter of a local store owner. For a short time, they became my people, too. I empathized with their yearnings, suffered their losses, and felt hopeful in their brief moments of happiness. This way of life has changed drastically with the introduction of roads and modern technology, but no doubt there still exist people that endure a large portion of hardship in this corner of the world.
“They is something about Hoot Owl Mountain makes a body lose heart. If you laid down to sleep on that pretty moss, you mought never wake up again in this world. It’s no telling where you’d wake up.”
The novel begins with a young woman named Jennifer who has taken on the task of researching her family history for a college project. The voices of various ancestors come to life one after another in their telling of a past steeped with heartache, longing, intrigue, and superstition. After a while I forgot this was Jennifer’s pursuit. Lee Smith makes the reader believe the stories are being told directly to him or her. I’ve never lived in the south, but I’ve read a decent share of Appalachian literature by now to be able to say that the dialect is authentic. Naturally, the author knows how these people converse with one another, how they pass down their stories. Even Granny Younger, whose voice might be more difficult for a “foreigner” (as the locals label anyone not born in this area) to understand, was a pleasure to read and helped set the tone of these tales. Rumors of witchery are woven throughout, affecting the behavior of the residents and even the outsiders to this place. There is one section told from the point of view of a city man sent there to teach the children. Richard’s story was enlightening, as we see the mountains and its people from his eyes, much like the reader might do if one happened to stumble into these parts unawares. He too comes under the spell of the place as he falls in love with a local beauty.
“I went always, in those days, in a state of grace, or dread perhaps, a state at any rate of a kind of emotional pointillism, with each nerve quite on edge. I felt fragile, I felt razor-thin, as if to be toppled by any breeze…”
Despite the multiple points of view, as both minor and major characters chime in, the entire piece felt like a musical composition held together by the fabric of family, local history, and a whisper of the supernatural. A pair of gold hoop earrings brought together the various voices into a melodic piece that culminates in an outro that was hugely satisfying. I was as bewitched as the Cantrells. This is not my first time reading this author, nor will it be the last. This was an excellent piece, well worth the five stars. But if you want to discover just why I fell head over heels with the artistry of Lee Smith’s prose as well as which literary character I revere over nearly any other, then I beg you to hunt down a copy of Fair and Tender Ladies. You won’t be sorry!
“… we human beings are all like planets which revolve throughout the great darkness of the universe. Sometimes our orbits bring us perilously close to one another; other times, we collide with a great explosion of sparks; but more often than that, we simply spin on in ignorance, through the vast globy blackness of space.”...more
“A person becomes part of what he does, grows into what grows around him, and if he works the land, he comes to be the land, and owner of and4.5 stars
“A person becomes part of what he does, grows into what grows around him, and if he works the land, he comes to be the land, and owner of and slave to it.”
Once upon a time, I tried to grow a vegetable garden in my backyard. I drove to the gardening center in my air conditioned car, paid for seeds and starter plants with my credit card, and stopped to get some groceries at the supermarket – including fruits and vegetables, because who knows whether this garden thing will really work out or not. It’s just for fun anyway, right?! I dug up a patch of land in the backyard, planted the little seeds and plants, hooked up the gardening hose to the sprinkler, and crossed my fingers. I’d sit on the back patio on a nice summer night, admiring the progress of the garden over my takeout dinner from a local restaurant. Some days I had to drag myself out to that little garden patch and pull weeds, the sun beating down on me for the hour or so I had to spend out there once a week. I cursed that sun for making me sweat and the deer and rabbits for chewing on some of the plants. I consoled myself with an iced beverage. Eventually my hard work paid off and I had myself some nice yellow squash, zucchini, and some other such vegetables I can no longer quite recall. I had more than I could eat and gave away loads of it to friends and family. It was a hobby, not to be repeated the following year, because, well, I was too busy for that kind of manual labor …
“From here they could see mountains strewn in all directions, and it was awesome to consider the marvels and dens and torrents of this new country, to feel the loneliness of being here, yet at the same time the right of belonging here…”
My head would have hung in shame had I been a settler in a new land. The folks that populated this story of a hardscrabble life in the mountains of North Carolina during the late eighteenth century would have scoffed at my ineptitudes. These people had a dream to start fresh in a new place and to make something of the land. They were hard-working and determined. Well, to be fair, there were a couple of slackers in the group, and likely I would have been among these few. I’d have taken off not to go fishing but to read my novel by the babbling brook. I’d smell the corn pone baking from a mile away and head to the cottage with hopes of a handout. Stirring the meal and starting the fire on my own would have been tedious work; best leave this to the enterprising women of the bunch.
Seriously, though, I have so much admiration for the inhabitants of these tucked away corners of the earth. Far from civilization, they had to form communities from very little at all. Their enemies were the weather, bear, panthers, wolves, and the land itself as it was often unyielding and uncompromising. The seasons for them were not a matter of whether they could sunbathe or ice skate, but whether or not they would have enough food and supplies to actually survive. And like any modern day bunch, sometimes they were antagonistic towards one another. It takes harmony and goodwill to make a community survive and thrive, and oftentimes there were disagreements, hard feelings and frustration towards other members of the settlement. Love, too, could cause rivalries, hostilities, and distractions.
This is such an engaging story and the authenticity in the writing is evident. Author John Ehle knew all about this kind of life. He could trace his own ancestry straight back to this time and place. The people are myriad and imperfect but I rooted for every one of them. I so wanted all that backbreaking work and those dreams to come to fruition. It seems there is an entire set of these “Mountain Novels” so I don’t have to end my time in the North Carolina mountains just yet. I’m off to scour the used book sites once again.
“There’s no prettier sight and no prettier place than this one. It traps a man into staying, into building here; then it shows him that he doesn’t even possess his own cabin and fields. The valley is its own, he knew now. The valley and the beasts and the mountain and the snows and the water and the cliffs owned themselves yet. If he left here, in a few years there would be little sign that he had even come.”...more
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