Demon Copperhead and the Abandonment of Appalachia
The book that Hillbilly Elegy should have been
I mentioned in a footnote to my last newsletter that I recently read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Going into Thanksgiving, I decided it was time to read some fiction. Little did I know that I’d picked a 550 page book! (Kindle doesn’t always make that clear.)1
Kingsolver sets out to retell the story of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.2 In fact, Dickens is the first person referenced on her acknowledgements page:
I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.
She takes Dickens’ story of 19th century Suffolk, England and drops it in late twentieth-century Lee County, Virginia. The narrator, Damon, quickly picks up the title nickname (the last part comes from his bright red hair).
According to 2020 census figures, the median household income in Lee County is $35,000. Over a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Over 94% of the population is white and the unemployment rate in 1992 was 16% (now down to 3%).3
Demon is born to a widowed mother shortly after his father drowned in an accident (drowning is an ongoing theme). She struggles with drug and alcohol abuse. Thanks to support from the neighbor family, the Pegott’s, they do their best to get along. Demon’s mother remarries a stern disciplinarian named Stoner. Shortly thereafter she dies of an overdose.
He is then thrown into the understaffed, burned out, and somewhat ineffective department of child services. His first placement is at a tobacco farm, where a widowed farmer has taken in three other boys to work the farm. It’s a meager existence with a fair degree of brutality. The other boys continually weave their way through is story, for good or for ill. His second placement looked promising as it involved a young family but proved to be financially unstable with the father pursuing the latest get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme. He is underfed and lives in the laundry room with the dog. While there, he gets a job (at 12) sorting trash for a recycling/meth lab operation.
He takes off and travels to where his father was from and discovers his great aunt. She connects him to the home of the legendary football coach who immediately sees Demon’s potential for playing tight end on the high school team. He befriends Angus (really Agnes) and watches for the suspicious U-Haul (Kingsolver’s Uriah Heep character).
Kingsolver captures the special role of athletics, especially football, in providing fame and distinction upon its gladiators. Stardom, notoriety around town, cruising on the weekends. It is also related to how former athletes rely on that notoriety even though no longer playing.4 A football injury gives Demon his introduction into opioids and other painkillers to go along with the alcohol and weed that had been a staple of his teen years.
Another job at the local feed store leads him to the love of his life, Dori. Her father, dying of cancer, is on a broad system of drugs often used by Demon and Dori. The hardest part of the book goes into great detail on how the couple manages their ups and downs, their search for more drugs, the move to harder and harder substances. This is all compounded by the flood of opioids into rural Virginia (and the rest of Appalachia). Pills were so freely flowing that access was almost inevitable. The local pain clinic where people are buying and selling in the parking lot and where the doctor is willing to trade drugs for sexual favors is particularly depressing.
After Dori’s overdose, Demon is bereft and struggling to move forward. It is only his artwork that keeps him going (with the support of a local art teacher and from Tommy, one of his friends from the tobacco farm). Things come to a head as the various inter- and intra- family conflicts burst in actions that take the lives of two of Demon’s friends. He finally moves to the city for rehab and a halfway house to get back on his feet.
At a critical juncture while he was in rehab, he and Tommy are discussing a graphic novel Demon is working on. They contrast the money economy of the city with the land economy of their rural home. But where the latter creates the appearance of subsistence that isn’t possible in the city, it is still the fact that the monied interests have choked all there is of value out of the rural community.
Kingsolver, as she has done in previous books, shines a bright light on the social forces that animate or limit Demon’s life. The circumstances of minimum wage life around service economy, the rates of alcoholism and drug use, the lack of quality schools, and the dearth of jobs (without leaving family). She also critiques that way that the economic markets ignore Appalachia, how the pharmaceutical industry exploited them, how the foster care system fails the children it’s supposed to care for (through neglect or extreme case loads).
The book ends on a positive note, although it takes 500 of its 550 pages to get there. At the end of the story, Demon is with Angus and they are leaving to see the ocean (a long-time dream of his). But like David Copperfield of a century before, you can celebrate Demon’s success as an exception to the life course that had been laid out before him. Many of his friends were not so lucky.
Kingsolver doesn’t shy away from the myriad ways that we’ve abandoned places like Lee County. She paints a picture of the policies that weakened the area, eviscerated the mining industry, flooded the area with drugs, and required subsistence living.
It’s not that Demon is of special stock that allows him to rise above his setting. It’s that he was lucky enough to not have that setting drag him underwater.
I should have known. I read her Poisonwood Bible years ago and it was mammoth.
This newsletter will be full of spoilers.
A lot of the “improvement” is a result of people dropping out of the labor force. As of 2016, only 42% of those 16 and over were in the labor force. Over 20% of those under 65 are on disability.
I always think of John Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom as the epitome of this character.