Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Barbara Kingsolver

GENRE: Literary Fiction, Retelling

RATING: 2.5 stars

In a Nutshell: A contemporary retelling of the Dickens’ epic, ‘David Copperfield’. True to the original in flow, but the rest left me with mostly negative feelings. Outlier opinion coming up.

Story Synopsis:

Think ‘David Copperfield’ in a modern-day hillbilly setting.

Damon Fields was born to a teenage druggie mom in a trailer home. Because of the colour of his hair and his attitude towards life and people, he is nicknamed ‘Demon Copperhead.’ As Demon grows up in Lee County in the Virginian Appalachian region, he fights against his destiny and tries to make something of himself, though the odds keep going against him.

The story comes to us in the first person perspective of Demon.

I remember the dilemma I had faced while reviewing Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao, which was a modern-day retelling of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. While her adaptation had been faithful to the original, the classic itself was not suitable to a modernisation by virtue of its themes and its philosophy. This made her novel seem highly stereotypical and even offensive.

I face a similar conundrum this time, though Charles Dickens' classic ‘David Copperfield’ is much more flexible towards an updated retelling because of its universal themes.

If you have read the original epic, you will notice how faithfully and brilliantly Barbara Kingsolver has transported the characters to the Appalachian mountains. All the characters get a similar deal as in the original, albeit through a different approach thanks to the change in era and setting.

The characters have been given somewhat similar names as their older counterparts. Murdstone becomes Muller Stone, Steerforth becomes Sterling ford, Dora turns into Dori, Tommy Traddles is now Tommy Waddell… This kind of writing choice makes it very easy for us to remember whom each new character is based upon. (That said, I was not at all happy to see my favourite Agnes being changed to ‘Angus’.)

David Copperfield was the titular character’s coming-of-age story; Demon Copperfield is also a bindungsroman for its eponymous lead. Both characters are equally gutsy and equally judgemental. Both want to succeed despite the lemons life keeps throwing at them, and contrary to expectations, they do end up carving a niche for themselves in this haphazard world.

The plot is also faithful to the original. No one’s destiny changes paths just because of the modernisations. This is both good and bad. Good because I really respect authors who retain the spirit of the original in their retellings. (There’s no point calling a work a retelling if you retain nothing of the base work except the character names, right?) Bad because you already know what’s going to happen to every single one of them!

In other words, as a retelling, this book rates pretty high because it sticks to the format and still gives it a twist to make it stand on its own as an independent work.

Where the book failed for me is in its tawdry portrayal of the mountain people. Don’t get me wrong. Kingsolver is a master at settings, and this book is no exception. The mountains of Lee County come alive through her beautiful descriptions. But it was somewhat disappointing to see every possible stereotype about the locals make its way into this book. This is somewhat ironic because Demon tells us multiple times how he feels upset about the stereotypes outsiders have about his people, and then he goes on to live a life reiterating every single cliché through his own deeds, which sounds even worse when heard in first person. Drugs, alcohol, sex, cuss words, poverty, physical violence, domestic violence, social backwardness, racial discrimination ,… you name it and it is there in this book. I am not going to remark on how much of this might be based on reality as I have no first-hand experience of that culture and hence have no right to judge. But from the way it was portrayed, I got hardly any good vibes about the community, and that it is a sure sign that only hackneyed ideas were being thrown at us.

Dickens’ work was also somewhat “misery porn” in style and slightly offensive against those not “physically perfect.” But as David Copperfield was written in the late 1840s, it gets away with this outdated style of writing. Demon Copperhead cannot use the era as an excuse. As it is a retelling, I am also taken aback by the amount of vulgarity in the story. This might not bother most readers, but to me, inserting crude content into a favourite classic story was akin to blasphemy.

How would you feel about this book without knowing the original? Well, you might like it better as you won’t keep comparing the two works and will read this one on its own merit. So if you are okay with the ribald content and the vapid portrayal of the hillbilly people, this story *might* work better for you. Then again, the book is needlessly lengthy, because it skips nothing from the original plot. The start is appealing, but the middle is quite repetitive. The story stays stuck in this looped narrative until almost the very end, by which time I had lost all my patience with it.

To me, the book feels like an epic writing achievement in some ways, transporting 1800s upper class London to a modern hillbilly setting. But in most other ways, it feels so unbelievably flat and so offensive to the original as well as to the contemporary dwellers of the location that I cannot endorse it wholeheartedly.

I expected far more from Ms. Kingsolver.

Do note that this is very much an outlier review. So please read other reviews and take a call on this joint-winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.