Barbara Kingsolver’s Luminous Boy: A Review of Demon Copperhead

“People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harm’s way, and them saying bless your heart.” (4)

I’m a latecomer to Barbara Kingsolver. She’s always been on the periphery of my awareness—a favorite of book club groups, an advocate for Appalachia, environmentalist. But somehow her books never made it into my hands despite them showing up regularly on my wife’s nightstand.

So this year I took on two Kingsolver classics: The Poisonwood Bible, a 1995 tour de force about a Georgia missionary family off to live in the upper reaches of the Congo, and 2022’s Demon Copperhead, a book that was just named the best book of the 21st century in a New York Times readers’ poll. Each tipping the scales at 500+ pages. Each magnificent.

Demon Copperhead is the more accomplished of the two if only because you can’t help but admire the audacity of the project. Awakened to the literary skill and social conscience of Charles Dickens while staying at a seaside guesthouse that was once the Dickens residence, Kingsolver set out to write about her southwestern Virginia home in the manner of David Copperfield.

It’s been awhile since I read that Dickens work, but you can feel the sturdy bones of Copperfield behind Kingsolver’s Copperhead. It’s not just in the short, episodic chapters suitable to serialization and the quirky updates of character’s names. (One of my favorites is how the slimy Uriah Heep becomes the slimy assistant coach U-Haul.) Dickens is also felt in the glowing humanity of the title character and in the way a series of misfortunes nevertheless turns into a spellbinding read.

You can also see how Dickens’ genius for laying bare the social injustices of his society can still be useful today. As Demon says in an aside, “A good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it,” (520) and there’s a lot to push back on in Lee County, Virginia. Not only the opioid calamity that ensnares the characters here, but the long history of an extractive economy that leaves broken bodies and spirits in its wake. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disasters, but Demon is more than just another victim. Halfway through I had adopted this orphaned boy and committed to going the distance with him.

Kingsolver only occasionally slips into an analytic voice that seems out of character for her Appalachian subjects. This was distracting enough for my Kingsolver-loving spouse to claim that this was a rehash of Beth Macy’s excellent nonfiction book about opioids in Virginia, Dopesick. But I appreciated how Demon Copperhead didn’t let us get out of our main character’s head for long. The moves to the balcony level were brief and mostly welcome.

All of the virtues of The Poisonwood Bible were present in Copperhead, too. The gift for dialect and for creating characters whose English is filled with malapropisms and yet still poetic. The uncanny way she inhabits the deepest depths of her characters’ minds. The attention to the beauty and spell of place. The obvious but not showy hard work she has put in.

What’s new here is her ability as a mature writer to flesh out an adolescent boy. She had characters of a similar age in Poisonwood, but they were all female. There is something Jonathan Franzen-esque in the fearlessness with which she jumps into characters with a different gender identity than her own. It’s been a minute since I was a teenaged boy but the interior world of Demon was one I recognized.

All to say that this book deserves the acclaim it has been given. I’ve yet to do my own ranking of 21st century books, but this will certainly be on the list. And Kingsolver must surely rate as a national cultural treasure.

One of the looming presences in this book is water. From the frightening mountain pool where his father died named Devil’s Bathtub, to the distant ocean Demon longs to see, there is something large and portentous about bodies of water. “What do I know about ocean?” he asks early on. Still he wants “to meet the one big thing I know is not going to swallow me alive.” (3)

It’s a question roiling through all the addiction stories that follow—how do we face these terrors that want to eat us up and how much of it is our doing? The ocean in all its fierceness must be met, but Demon’s conviction is that ultimately it will not erase him.