Paul Bryant's Reviews > Demon Copperhead

This started well and within 50 pages was exactly what I was hoping it would be, an eye-opening unflinching look at something I’d never thought about before – foster care in Appalachia. I love big socially crusading novels! Turns out that in Virginia in the 90s foster care = child exploitation. Either you cash the DSS cheque and starve them (simple version) or you cash the DSS cheque, starve them and make them work eight hour shifts after school doing some crippling job no one else would do (sophisticated version).

That part of the book was great. Then like a drug deal where they all end up dead it went bad real quick.

To get to the second Big Issue that Demon Copperhead was going to deal with, which is the very famous American opioid addiction crisis, we follow our sparky poor white trash kid through his rescue from the horrible exploiters and his adoption by the local school football coach whose name is Coach and his month by month growing up into an aggravating smart-mouthed kid with all the usual preoccupations of girls, dope, drink and cartooning (and people who have zero interest in American football might want to know that there are many pages devoted to the subject), and it turns out that as soon as this poor kid stops being pounded on and tortured quite so much he becomes very tiresome very quickly. I had been told by reviewers in some big fat newspapers that this was a page turner and had a propulsive plot that never stopped. They lied. The plot keels over onto live support around page 150.

But it wasn’t really the wheezing broke-down plot that was the problem. I jacked in this Pulitzer Prizewinning but not Booker Prize longlisted novel because I could not stand this kid’s voice. Every sentence is crammed with quippy slangy smartarseness. This kid is drenched in rueful self-awareness, wagging his head sorrowfully yet smirkily yet self-deprecatingly, and he never goes to a party or a funeral without describing everybody there & their relation to everybody else & what they were wearing and what they were drinking and what car they were driving or would want to have been driving. This kid thinks he’s wise and funny. He doesn’t seem to think he’s very annoying. And neither does Barbara Kingsolver. He is always saying stuff like

Good people, bad people, what does that even mean? Get down to the rock and the hard place, and we’re all just soft flesh and the weapon at hand.

Voice is crucial to a book in the first person and it’s not easy to get right. Raymond Chandler does, DBC Pierre doesn’t, Irvine Welsh does, JD Salinger doesn’t, Charles Dickens does. My does might be your doesn’t. But if you are one of the many who think Barbara Kingsolver does get it right, then it’s your lucky day, because there’s 548 small-type pages of it.



The reviewer deciding to give up Demon Copperhead