A Dickensian universe in a swoon

Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel grapples with the harsh realities of childhood in a world of unstable adults

The grown-up world is no place for children. And yet, every day they are born into its filthy air, its wars, its accidents, its pestilences, its loveless homes. Adults can be such racketeers, trafficking in innocence. Their brood must learn early to negotiate for a bit of space, or crumbs of sustenance, or a voice in the din, or a small share of kindness.

The Bildungsroman depicts, with fiction’s ripe interiority, the predicaments of a young protagonist who must navigate a wretched fate in a world full of unstable adults. In Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year, the hero, Damon Fields, cynical, irreverent, but prone to introspection, makes an observation about childhood: “For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard.”

For Damon, or Demon (a natural transmogrification of his name), childhood, or at least the milk-and-cookies version of it, is not an option. His very birth, in a trailer home to an eighteen-year-old drug addict who has passed out on the bathroom floor, is an act of impossible courage: “…the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.”

Demon’s life in Lee County, Virginia, its arc leading from one foster home to another, is convulsed with temporariness, a sense of being shunted off over and over again. Courage, then, is a prerequisite to survival. Ms Kingsolver depicts a Dickensian universe, set amidst the trailer pileups, muddy creeks, and tobacco fields of the southern Appalachian Mountains. She reimagines David Copperfield and presents a world racked with the hunger and loneliness of children, swooning with adults who overdose on OxyContin, jittery with neglect and abuse. The characters of Demon Copperhead will seem familiar to those who have read Dickens’ most autobiographical novel, which was first published serially from 1849-1850. There are the Peggots, who live in the trailer next door, and offer Demon a fleeting normalcy in the warmth of their home, in spite of their own traumatising histories. Nance Peggot, for instance, is reminiscent of the housekeeper Clara Peggotty in David Copperfield. Demon, in a gesture that reveals his longing for familial relationships, calls Nance Peggot Mammaw. “But I thought all kids got a mammaw, along with a caseworker and free school lunch and the canned beanie-weenies they gave you in a bag to take home for weekends. Like, assigned.” 

While Demon is a slangy, accented, and red-haired version of David (“Copperhead” is suffixed to his name because of his hair, and his impertinence), he also brings to mind so many other heroic vagabonds, or angsty young people. Rudyard Kipling’s Kimball O’Hara, J D Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff, Victor Hugo’s Cosette. Across the centuries, and in disparate settings, these are children who find themselves alone in a world eager to snuff them out or use them for profit. These are children who must tread with caution, and always be prepared to flee, for at any moment, the hands that feed them may smash their faces for asking for a second helping.

Even though Demon Copperhead is an abysmal sketch of childhood, foster care, and child services, the novel is often bathed in a tranquil light. Moments of tenderness glimmer through the sludge of circumstances. Demon visits Knoxville with the Peggots, which is where their daughter June, who is a nurse, lives. With her, he gets the briefest vacation — together they visit a trampoline park, a zoo, a giant aquarium. On another visit during Christmas, soon after his mother dies of drug overdose, he and a girl named Emmy Peggot share confidences in the night, while the others are asleep. “I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry,” he reveals.

Demon is keenly aware of the natural world and its exquisite gifts. While working at Creaky Farm, one of his foster homes, he and Tommy Waddles (another foster, and reminiscent of Tommy Traddles in David Copperfield), who are at the edge of the woods, sit in the shade to listen to the birds: “Birds having their discussions, a woodpecker making his little tack-tack-tacks, this whole other life of little beings out here minding their business and not actually giving a damn about yours.” At his mother’s funeral, when he is eleven, he observes the wasps buzzing at the stained-glass windows of the church, all through the service.

Lee County, with its rolling mountains, its creeks and rocky terrain teeming with copperheads, its coal camps, its rich mud offers Demon some solace from his life of food-stamp envelopes. But, like all heroes, he will embark upon a perilous journey, away from a “home” that is hostile, in search of family, kinship, and perhaps, some day, love.

The writer is the author of Stillborn Season, a novel set amidst the anti-Sikh riots of 1984