Barbara Kingsolver thanks Charles Dickens in ‘Acknowledgement’ for writing David Copperfield. Similarly, I’d need to thank Book Club Mom. I hadn’t heard of Kingsolver, but her blog made me want to read the book. 546 pages, what we used to call epics. But for Charles Dickens, with his newspaper serialisation, Copperhead would be labelled a short story. Dickens had a wonderful handle on people’s names. Like epigrams, he matched them to his characters. David Copperfield thus becomes under Kingsolver’s alchemy Demon Copperhead. Her setting is not the satanic mills and black soot of the British Industrial Revolution, but Lee County amid the legalised Purdue plague of Oxy-script mills that killed 500 000 Americans (and still counting).
First chapter. Demon introduces himself as narrator.
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‘First I got myself born. Like a little blue prizefighter.’
Demon, in his search for adolescent redemption, is reminded by his art teacher, Mrs Armstrong, that art is work. Demon knows about child labour. He’s been working since he was ten. Chasing the Oxy dragon costs $80 that makes the billionaire Sackler family even richer. Demon breaks that down to two days working in a store, or a week’s work in the rubbish tip outside Mr Jolly’s, knocking a nail into car batteries to salvage the acid to make crank. Purdue, with their computer models, targeted Lee County to make super-profit on their drugs, and the American way of life. The army and navy, in their gold braid, set up store in the schools picking up the slack for the armed services, with great success after 9/11 and pedalling the mythology of kicking ass.
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Mr Armstrong teaches schoolboy Civics in Lee County. Painting rainbows. History becomes literature that resonates with Demon.
‘That Holden guy held my interest. Hating school, going to the city to chase whores and watch rich people’s nonsense, and when you come to find out, all he wants in his heart is to stand at the edge of a field coaching little boys before they go over a cliff like he did. I could see that. I mean see it, I drew it, with those white cliffs on the Kentucky border, where Miss Barks took me that time. I’ve not ever seen rye growing, so I made him the catcher in the tobacco. Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and foreign, but Christ Jesus 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.’
Barbara Kingsolver won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2023) and was co-recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Demon Copperhead.
Martha Gills turns that on its head and asks if female novelists need a women’s prize for fiction.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/18/female-novelists-dont-need-their-own-prizes-lets-abolish-them
Debut novelists are mainly woman. Women, like Kingsolver, dominate the New York Times’ bestsellers list. Women buy 80% of books. For every man in the publishing industry there are two women. Women like to read about strong female characters.
Charles Dickens gave women a gender role of supporting characters to men or boys. In Dombey and Son, for example, a shipping magnate rejects his daughter’s love and falls for a femme fatale, bankrupting his family, morally and literally. Dicken’s contemporaries such as Wilkie Collins have the beautiful Women in White as a doppelganger. A jumping-off point for murky deeds in a man’s world. George Elliot had to be recognised as a man before she could write about women and men. The androgynous Angus who is somehow also Agnes is Shakespearian, not something Dickens works into his world of fiction. Kingsolver has all kinds of women orbiting Demon Copperhead and shaping him into the boyish man he will become.
Demon’s little ‘bleach blonde’ mom is Dickensian. Smoking her Pall Malls and living in a trailer. Demon’s nemesis, Stoner, who muscles in on his mom and family life, equally so. Mrs Peggot who rents the trailer to his mom, but also acts as his mom. That’s Dicken’s Mrs Peggoty. A body to hide behind. A woman that does what needs to be done in a man’s world. Her presence an act of empathetic love. Matt Peggot, known as Maggot, her grandson also needs mothering. His mother in prison. She stabbed her sadistic wife-beating husband seventy-six times. Wrongly convicted, the Peggot family believe, but that’s justice for the poor. Her other daughter, June, is hot like all the Peggot girls, but she’s also got herself an education Got herself out of Lee County. Little more than a girl, she’s bringing up her niece Emmy. The Peggoty world hangs together with mom and dad. But Demon is not a Peggot. He’s part of the Melungeons of Appalachia who came to dig coal and make a life.
The beginning of his odyssey is a search for his grandma after Stoner and the social services rip the heart out of a small boy and leave him in a lay-by exposing the American dream for what it is. Read on.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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