Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
Faber & Faber, £20

TO write Demon Copperhead, her 10th novel in the past 35 years, Barbara Kingsolver turned for inspiration to Charles Dickens, whom she calls her “genius friend.”

In the acknowledgements she writes: “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.”

Among all of Dickens’s many novels, David Copperfield clearly offered Kingsolver the most accessible.

Like David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead is told in the first person by a young man finding and losing and finding his way in the world.

Kingsolver’s protagonist and narrator — a poor white kid, a drug addict, an orphan and a born again artist — explains that while Dickens was a “seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Jesus Christ did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”

For Copperhead, “around here” means Appalachia, where Kingsolver lives on a farm with her husband.

But she is no Charles Dickens; to try to lodge herself in his literary company only sets her up for unfavourable comparisons, and to focus on Dickens as a novelist who only offers critiques of the ills of society is to reduce him to a stereotype of an author waging cultural warfare against his society.

That perspective leaves out his comedy, his love of the grotesque and his creativity as a literary architect who built big complex novels with suspense, mystery and inimitable characters.

Unlike Dickens, Kingsolver provides no characters as memorable as Mr Micawber, Uriah Heap and Copperfield himself, whom Dickens describes as “the hero of the story.”

Kingsolver doesn’t call Copperhead a hero. He’s too tarnished and too implicated in his own use of drugs and downfall to be dubbed heroic.

Had he sounded like poor white and southern Huck Finn he might have been more believable, but then Kingsolver would have had to add race and caste to her picture and that would have been much more than she could have handled.

The real demon in the novel — that might be called “addiction fiction” — isn’t the main character but rather OxyContin and the opioid crisis brought on by fentanyl, the drug that has afflicted the entire nation, including poor whites in Appalachia.

There’s plenty of material for a novelist of Kingsolver’s calibre to get worked up about and indignant over, and a long shelf of addiction fiction worth expanding, including William Burroughs’ Junkie and Naked Lunch, Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, Phillip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, and the progenitor of them all, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater from 1821.

Demon Copperhead doesn’t come remotely near any of them.

In his pivotal 1955 essay, Everyone’s Protest Novel, which tackles Uncle Tom’s Cabin, James Baldwin, no stranger to protest, rightly recognised that “the ‘protest’ novel is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene.”

All protest novels, it seems, must depict “a shit show,” to borrow a phrase that frequently appears in Demon Copperhead. They must exaggerate, stir up moral indignation and call upon readers to do something to change the world for the better.

Indeed, the protest novel, along with idealistic protesters, social causes, and do-good organisations make up the bedrock of US liberalism and readers who welcome and relish protest fiction might enjoy Kingsolver’s novel.

But readers who are wary of protest fiction as a genre will likely be put off by Kingsolver’s hammering away at social issues including injustice and inequality, the evils of tobacco, alcohol and OxyContin as well as her indignation about the stereotyping of “hillbillies,” “rednecks” and “melungeons”— the Appalachian ethnic group descended from poor whites, American Indians and black slaves.

In 1945, nearly 100 years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, George Orwell wrote: “I would back Uncle Tom’s Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf.”

One wonders what readers will think of Demon Copperhead in 100 years.

This is an abridged version of a review first published by counterpunch.org. Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.