The intellectual and spiritual quest at the heart of both novels meets resistance in the form of capital-I issues. Like Dickens, Kingsolver generates momentum by galloping the reader through escapades that accumulate to advance a larger question - in this case, about how an artist’s consciousness is formed. Although it is technically legal to spoil the ending of a story devised 173 years ago, I won’t, except to note that Kingsolver’s resolution departs in one major way from that of “David Copperfield,” which is almost universally regarded as a disappointment. Then: knee injury, doctor-prescribed painkillers, opioid addiction, young love and a relentless chain of tragedies interrupted sporadically with minor victories. High school football delivers a brief spell of glory.
In fifth grade he accidentally works at a meth lab. An attitude problem soon earns him the nickname “Demon.” His hair color explains “Copperhead.” When Mom overdoses Demon becomes a ward of the state, which is to say he undergoes a transformation from “boy” to “inventory.” He’s obsessed with Marvel superheroes and draws his own comics. Damon Fields is born in southwest Virginia in the late 1980s to a teenage mother who has equipped herself for childbirth with gin, amphetamines and Vicodin. It is an argument that this loss of prestige is unwarranted, impermanent, even benighted, and it is a rebuttal of the notion that ideologues can’t make great novelists, or that novels are no longer plausible vehicles for social change.īefore we consider those questions: the plot. Exhuming him is a way for her to make a claim of inheritance explicit at a time when teeming, boisterous, activist novels are unfashionable. Like Dickens, she is unblushingly political and works on a sprawling scale, animating her pages with the presence of seemingly every creeping thing that has ever crept upon the earth. Kingsolver’s resurrection of Dickens’s most sentimental (though cherished by many, including me) novel might seem a bit strange - as if Harry Styles had released a song-for-song remake of the original cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific.”īut then, from another angle: Of course Barbara Kingsolver would retell Dickens. In “Demon Copperhead,” Barbara Kingsolver offers a close retelling of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield,” which is either a baffling choice or an ingenious maneuver from a novelist who has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and selected for Oprah’s Book Club and regularly - inevitably, even - appears on the best-seller list of this newspaper, all while reaping a surprising quantity of stinging pans from critics.
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