[I’m reading this 2022 novel in four sections. As I finish reading each of these I write about it before reading on. so far I have read two quarters. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
2 February 2024
Chapters 1-19 (of 64)
I’m loving this. Why wouldn’t I? It has a first-person narrator whose voice, because Kingsolver is such a good writer, feels completely believable. It’s about a white underclass, a group who don’t get many novels written about them these days. The last one I read was Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, and I’m liking this one much more. Kingsolver’s poor whites aren’t brutalised beyond the reach of all humanity like most of Stuart’s characters, and it’s a relief. There are brutal characters here, mostly men, but there’s kindness too. Of course there is—this is based on a novel by Charles Dickens, and he made a point of aiming for the full range of human behaviour. In fact, the sentimentality he is often accused of can be seen as a part of his agenda. The poor are as worthy of compassion as anybody else…
…but compassion, like sentimentality, might imply patronising pity. Kingsolver’s use of a narrator from that layer of American society is brilliant. Here is someone who has survived his third-rate, damaging childhood, and experiences no one should have to endure, and he’s completely OK about telling us about it. But meanwhile, the clever linking that Kingsolver does between her novel and Dickens’s David Copperfield goes far beyond names and plot developments. Like Dickens, she cares enough to confront her middle-class readers, but far more than him, she gives the poor a voice.
Despite the knowing nods towards her 19th Century source, this is all about the crises facing white Americans at the bottom of the heap right now. And if I’m making it sound as though she’s banging a drum, that’s not how it is at all. The story is told as though from the inside, not by a middle-class boy down on his luck—and unlike David, Demon doesn’t overdo the self-pity. Both novels are supposedly narrated by these boys’ older selves, and I think Kingsolver does it better. People who started at the bottom—David didn’t—only need to tell it how it is, or was. Demon doesn’t hold back, but he doesn’t keep comparing his lot with what he used to have. With one exception, he didn’t have anything he regrets the loss of.
But that exception changes his life. He had a mother who, however messed-up she was, loved him as well as she could. Once he loses her—or, once she’s taken from him—he loses everything. It might be the biggest single similarity between the two boys’ experiences. Their mothers could hardly be more different, beyond their vulnerability and susceptibility to the will of a bullying man. But nobody’s making any comparisons, especially Demon. He knows what he’s lost, and he’s so angry he can’t even cry at her funeral. He wishes Murdstone—sorry, Murrell Stoner—were dead. Like David, he had been provoked into biting the monster in self-defence, and the callous stepfather has used it against him ever since. And while the system in pre-Victorian London wasn’t fit for purpose—in fact, there wasn’t any system at all—what counts for social care in late 20th Century America was no better. An indifferent stepfather had sent David Copperfield to Creakle’s chaotic school. A grotesquely underfunded social care system sends Demon to a life of bonded labour, whenever he isn’t at school, at Old Creaky’s farm.
If you know David Copperfield you might think you know the plot. But Kingsolver only keeps the main elements, clues often coming through names. Demon is really Damon ‘Copperhead’ Field, taking his nickname from the colour of his hair, a legacy of his father’s ‘Melungeon’ heritage. Field is his unmarried mother’s name. His best friend, before he meets the skeleton-doodling Tommy ‘Waddles’ Waddell, is Matt ‘Maggot’ Peggott. He’s the dark-haired gay who, even after Demon is sent away, still sees him at school. (I can’t think who he might be referencing from David Copperfield.) The Peggotts are made of the same salt of the earth as Dickens’s Peggotty, except there are two of them. Their speciality is looking after waifs and strays—Maggot is a nephew whose mother is in jail—but, at the point I’ve reached, she’s told Demon they are too old to take him on. Mr P isn’t a well man…. The farm run like a filthy, sloppy boot camp by Old Creaky—real name not important—is David’s fourth-rate school and the bottle-washing job rolled into one. There’s a set-piece chapter on the tobacco harvest—it’s the only crop the hilly Appalachian farms can draw a profit from, and that’s under threat by the late nineties—makes David’s experience sound like a picnic.
In other words, Kingsolver is doing a really clever job. She isn’t modernising Dickens, she’s making something new, and strange. And, quite often, laugh-out-loud hilarious. Demon’s knowing pre-adolescent cynicism—and I’m assuming the adult Demon or Damon telling us about it hasn’t acquired any rose-coloured glasses on the way—is as refreshing for its honesty as David’s sentimentality rarely is. But I haven’t told you what Kingsolver does with the other David Copperfield story arc, Steerforth and Little Em’ly. Yes.
At the point I’ve reached, Demon is as besotted by his hero and as attached to his childhood sweetheart as David. Fast Forward, real name Sterling Ford (Sterling like silver and Ford like the greatest engines ever, Demon decides), is the only one not worked like a slave by Old Creaky. He fulfils exactly the same role as Steerforth, and the reader gives a little shudder when Emmy, the sweetheart, vaguely mentions she’d like to meet him one day. Demon’s met her when Mrs Peggot takes him and Maggot to visit her sister, June Peggot, who stands in for Peggotty in Yarmouth. But this is a Knoxville apartment, not Yarmouth, and the only hint of a house-boat is a desultory game the kids play. Emmy’s already getting a bit old for such things, but insists they’re in a boat, not a fort. June has looked after Emmy since infancy, and adopts her as her daughter in the few months before Demon next meets her at Christmas.
Is that enough? Before I read on, an in-joke for David Copperfield afficionados. The harassed, overworked case-worker assigned to Demon is Miss Barks. She’s a babe, he thinks—the hormones are starting to kick in by the time he’s about to meet Emmy for the second time—but she’s too young, and not suited to the realities of her job. As I don’t think anybody ever says, Barks is willing, but it just isn’t enough. Ha Ha. But the biggest takeaway for me is Demon’s stoicism. Sure, he can’t help the tears coming when Mrs Peggot explains why he can’t simply move in with them. He’s just spent the best Christmas ever in Knoxville with all the Peggots, and the idea of going back to the farm is too much to bear. But he bears it. And I notice that the first sentence of the next chapter—I peeked—is ‘Starting from that day, in that kitchen, I was on my own.’ Yep.
Chapters 20-34
Demon really is on his own. His mother is dead, Stoner is indifferent, and even Miss Barks realises she can’t stay as an underpaid child welfare officer all her life. By the time she’s decided she’s leaving, she’s the only person in the world he has any connection with and he’s devastated by the news. Et cetera…. I’ll come back to the et ceteras, but I think that in these chapters Kingsolver runs into a structural difficulty. Like David Copperfield, Demon’s time of dreadful trial is happily brought to an almost fairy-tale end. David, his painstakingly accrued savings having been stolen as soon as he’s on the road, tramps his way to Dover and is saved by his aunt. Demon… ditto, except Betsy Woodall is his dead father’s mother. OK, he’s hitch-hiking, but the low-lifes he encounters are at least as bad as those on the Dover road. And the contrast with the dreamlike idyll of his new life at school is a step too far in a narrative that up to now has attempted to stay in touch with some kind of plausible reality. Kingsolver does her best, getting Demon to obsess over how such a dream can’t last, but it’s nowhere near enough. A fairy godmother deus ex machina, and one lucky break after another, just feels silly.
Is Kingsolver’s novel realistic up to Demon’s change of fortune? Not necessarily, but it contains a far greater number of realistic features than any Dickens novel. Which isn’t a criticism of Dickens. In his novels, a different kind of truthfulness is enough to put him in an almost unique category—he can use comedy tropes and plot twists in the service of a serious agenda. Kingsolver’s way, up to now, has had to be different, more conventional. So that the loveable Micawbers, for example, become the McCobbs, whose lives are not a series of comic lurches from one crisis to the next. They suffer, and the marriage suffers, and Demon hears their incessant rows from where he sleeps in the dog’s room. And Mrs Micawber’s comic—but genuine—admiration for her husband is replaced by Mrs McCobb’s defiant vow that she will never divorce hers. There is no generosity in Mr McCobb. He expects Demon to pay for his own board and lodging, despite the fostering payments he gets. Demon has to take an after-school job, despite not being even twelve years old yet, in which bottle-washing duties—which Kingsolver slyly references in passing—are the easiest and safest ones going. Sifting trash and draining battery-acid is more his line of work.
So this second quarter of the novel is a little disappointing for me. Ironically, I feel slightly hobbled by having done a close reading of David Copperfield quite recently. It means I always know more or less what’s coming next. Demon has had to hit rock bottom, and has had to have his (very) hard-earned savings stolen, and then make his way to the house of the old woman who visited his mother shortly after he was born. She is considered eccentric, living out of town and taking deprived girls under her wing to make sure they get an education. She helps an incapacitated man, as old as she is, who had been the victim of his family’s prejudice all his life. He writes, and makes kites that Demon makes sure he can fly. This is a step-for-step carbon copy…
…which means that Demon then goes to a proper school, far more upmarket than any previous one he’s attended. He’s now the protégé of the football coach (rather than the lawyer David lives with in Canterbury), the widow of one of Betsy’s early successes. There is a girl, Agnes/‘Angus,’ who has more good sense than anybody else he is ever likely to meet, and is clearly the one earmarked for a life together with Demon once he’s sorted out his hormone-fuelled crushes on other girls. He and Agnes/Angus are soulmates, discovering common ground—including his own unexpected (by him, not the reader) ‘gifted and talented’ superpower. He’s very bright, and has as natural a talent for art as David has for storytelling and writing. He sails through at least two years of school…
…and so on. Are we nearly there yet? I kept wondering—Dickens glosses over David’s happy school in a single chapter (‘Retrospect’), whereas Kingsolver seems determined to stretch things out. Demon is now tall, good-looking, dressed in the best sports fashion, and the coach has his back. He also shows exactly the required level of commitment for Coach Winfield (Whitfield in David Copperfield) to train him up as a footballer. And Betsy—Woodall, not Trotwood—visits to make sure he’s getting everything he needs to prepare him for a worthwhile and fulfilling adulthood. You can see what I mean by all this being hard to square with any reality we might be acquainted with. These are Victorian, specifically Dickensian tropes, not socially aware modern fiction.
I should shut up about it—although I await with interest how Kingsolver is going to get Demon to choose entirely the wrong life partner before settling down with the right woman. Maybe in this novel, he won’t. Settle down with the right woman. In David Copperfield plausibility, as so often, is stretched far beyond breaking-point in order for Agnes to be still waiting for him after he has made a complete hash of his emotional life in adulthood. In Dickens, she’s been having to look after her father, befuddled by a mixture of drink and Uriah Heep’s plotting into losing almost all he has. We’ve seen Coach Winfield’s bad drinking habits, and we’ve met the dangerously resentful ‘U-Haul’ Pyles—great name—who has already let Demon know he’d better get ready for big changes coming. Like Heep, he has a snake-like habit of making it his business to surreptitiously pry into his boss’s affairs. In fact, he shares Heep’s repulsive reptilian qualities to the extent that it sometimes feels like plagiarism.
So you get the picture. And you get why I’m not convinced—Kingsolver’s project not being helped, for me, by the fact that I was never convinced by David Copperfield either. Like Demon, David goes from rock-bottom to adolescent happiness through the happy intervention of a raft of helpful adults plus a girl slightly older than he is who wants to help as much as they do. In fact, Demon is even better off than David. He has Coach Winfield, whose reflected glory makes his time at the football-obsessed school easy from day 1. He has Mr Armstrong, in charge of a far wider education than ordinary teachers offer. He has Annie, not just Armstrong’s wife but a teacher—an art teacher!—who wants to do nothing in the world more than convince Demon that he’s as gifted an art student as any she’s ever taught. If it wasn’t for those pesky hormones he’d be home and dry. Not that they’ve really kicked in yet—he’s only fourteen, and the ersatz Dora Spenlow is a long way off, I’m guessing—but they will. And they will probably bring greater disaster for Demon than David’s silly crush brings him.
Enough? If I think of anything more I’ll tell you next time.
Chapters 35-49
Two things, to start with. One, Kingsolver’s determination to stay close to the plot of David Copperfield—because I can’t help making a mental note of how she’s doing it, every step of the way. And two, her more interesting project in these chapters concerning Demon’s painfully slow education in the realities of big money’s exploitation of working people in contemporary America. It used to be the coalmining companies. Now it’s the unregulated drug industry.
All along, Demon has believed he is alone in the handicaps he was born into. OK, so Kingsolver—like Dickens—piles on the afflictions he has to bear in the early sections of the novel. All around him are people, it seems, who are a lot better off than he is. It scars him, makes him think of himself as the outsider, the poor foster kid who never gets any love. But in these chapters, as he reaches fifteen and sixteen, he is forced to look at the truths about everybody’s lives in what used to be the coal belt. For a time, he is a star footballer, rising above it. But then Kingsolver hits him with a new affliction, a knee injury that ends his short-lived career. He’s devastated, obviously—but it’s what Kingsolver needs him to face. Sport is one of the ways out of the shit-heap the former coalmining regions have become. Demon is going to have to find a different way and, at the point I’ve reached, we’re getting a big hint of what that might involve. Great. But how on earth is he going to look after the clueless girl he’s fallen in love with—and the drug addiction they’ve both fallen into?
But what’s this with David Copperfield? Readers who don’t know Dickens’s novel might be mystified by some of the turns in the plot in these chapters, but those who do have the luxury of seeing how Kingsolver uses them can see how she changes things, always with good reason. Unlike Demon, David finds education and it helps him to recognise his own superpower. He’s a natural storyteller, and he turns it to good use in a career in writing. Demon, like so many bright kids from the wrong background, feels that education has nothing to tell him. When his new superpower as a footballer brings him easy popularity and interest from girls, he forgets all about his first, more important gift—when he sees the art teacher he has a crush on, Annie Armstrong, behaving badly at a party he loses whatever interest he had in art. It’s those pesky hormones again.
Kingsolver is going to make him learn some harder, possibly more realistic lessons than David has to… which she begins by having an aggressive football defender mangle his knee. David has more choice in the matter, eventually becoming a writer because the life and salary of an articled lawyer’s clerk won’t do for him in married life. It’s much more urgent than that for Demon. In fact, everything’s more urgent in Kingsolver’s novel. For instance, anyone hoping to reboot David Copperfield for a more sceptical era is going to find it hard work to make the David/Dora/Agnes thread plausible—so Kingsolver speeds things up, a lot. Demon and Dori are still only sixteen by the point I’ve reached, and their mutually destructive relationship is already reaching a crisis.
How many plot connections is that so far? Three? A lot more are to do with other characters. It makes a lot of the subsidiary action feel a little predictable. We know Emmy is going to run away from the safe (if dull) ‘Hammer,’ we know where Rose Dartell got that nasty scar across her mouth, we know about the tiny celebrity hairdresser, and how she will play some part in the novel later. ‘Mouse’ is much more sinister and dangerous than Miss Moucher—she’s a drug dealer and has Fast Forward working for her, so we await developments. Aunt June is Mr Peggotty, grimly determined to bring Emmy back from whatever abyss she’s fallen into. And U-Haul really is working through the Uriah Heep playbook, step by slithering step. He’s made sure he’s been promoted now, and can really lord it over Demon after the injury. Worse, he’s got his eye on the merchandise—I think that’s his word—in the form of Angus. We know that, like Uriah, he’s tampering with Coach Winfield’s accounts, faking criminal wrongdoing to use as blackmail against both father and daughter.
There are other connections, like Demon’s lifelong obsession with seeing the ocean. In this section he fails to get there in a disastrous trip with Maggot, Fast Forward and Emmy—and we wonder how a future trip there might reflect the tragic denouement of the Ham/Steerforth subplot in David Copperfield. But… that’s only interesting for Dickens geeks.
The other thing I mentioned at the beginning of this section is Kingsolver’s focus on Demon’s downtrodden community. West Virginia is a region that America is happy to mock for its ignorance, and she is definitely setting out to redress the balance. Early in this section she has Mr Armstrong, in one of his hard-hitting civics lessons, offering a clear socialist critique of business practices in these former coalmining regions. But Kingsolver lets the blighted lives and early deaths of former workers speak for themselves. Mr Peggot had been disabled at work, and in these chapters he dies before his time. It might have been something that Demon hadn’t really thought about before, but he does now. Meanwhile Dori’s father is chronically ill with the kind of lung disease that’s common among former coal and asbestos workers, and his death at the age of about fifty is far too much for the fragile, unworldly Dori to cope with.
There’s no counterpart to this in Dickens’s novel, and it isn’t the only early 21st Century problem Kingsolver takes urgent issue with. Another one has an immediate and devastating effect on Demon himself—corrupt practices in the drug industry. Kingsolver cleverly has it that Coach Winfield is determined not to take the dreadful knee injury seriously enough, and he is happy to let the dodgy team doctor prescribe dangerous doses of OxyContin. Kingsolver has Demon compellingly describe both the chronic pain he suffers and the blissfulness of the relief the drug brings. The route he takes to addiction is presented as plausible to the point of near-inevitability…
…and Kingsolver doesn’t need Charles Dickens to provide her with this new wrong turn in his life. She allows Dori—the beautiful, ethereal, artless Dori—easy access to drugs supplied to her father by the same unscrupulous doctor. It’s a tiny step for her to go from selling the weekly excess for huge profits—she’s only fallen in with what everybody else is doing—to becoming a user herself. The ‘first time’ that she promises Demon on his Homecoming night—which crowns him as hero, after the injury he knows is life-changing—is in the use of a terrifying cocktail of heavy narcotics that are new to both of them. They’re doomed—or, at least, Dori is. Dickens has Dora die in childbirth. I don’t know what will bring Dori down, but we know Demon will manage to survive.
But that will have to come later. At the point I’ve reached, Demon is heading to rock-bottom—he’s told himself it would be the right thing to move out of the Winfield house and into what has now become Dori’s. Kingsolver also has him pretending Coach has no real connection to him now his football days are over, so he’s able to tell himself he’s doing the right thing by leaving, with zero prospects. There is, of course, a pretty broad hint that there is going to be a way out for him in the end. Hard work and his artistic talent will come to the rescue, because we can be pretty sure that Kingsolver isn’t going to let go of the feelgood possibilities of the David Copperfield model.
But what I’m still wondering about is whether she can manage to keep it convincing. It’s too early to say, I suppose, but it’s interesting how far she’s moved away from Dickens so she can concentrate those harsh 21st Century issues. Maybe, by the end of the novel, the links between the novels will seem unimportant. Which begs the question, why has she bothered with it at all? Maybe I’ll think differently about it later.
Chapters 50-64—to the end
Is this a brilliant novel? I love these chapters for a lot of reasons, not least because the David Copperfield structure liberates Kingsolver more than it restricts. But that’s only the start. Demon has really, really found his voice, and he is able to describe the unfolding tragedy of these people’s lives in a way that is never sentimental. Some of it is even laugh-out-loud funny, even though Kingsolver always has Demon somehow insisting that these are lives that matter. And she finds a way to bring to a satisfying close her critique of a broken American society whilst offering the reader the genuine pleasure of believing that Demon really might be able to make it as a viable adult. It’s what Dickens always does, so why not take that from his novel along with the rest? The reader is sent away happy, and what could be better than that?
By Chapter 50, where I’m resuming, Demon’s real superpower has already been in play for some time. Tommy had needed somebody to help him with his underpaid job of effectively running a local weekly newspaper. It only exists for the advertising revenue, of course, but Tommy also has to collate state and national agency news and—wait for it—the syndicated cartoons. They’re terrible, of course, and you can guess how this goes. Not that Demon is blasé about it, quite the reverse, but after a few strips introducing his not quite tongue-in-cheek local superhero RedNeck he’s starting to get noticed. He’s been drawing superheroes all his life—I might not have mentioned it—and he knows all the tropes and conventions. But it’s Tommy who soon has all the ideas for stories. Kingsolver has made him a great reader, her neat way of getting round the difficulty of Demon never having read anything but comics. David Copperfield, from the start, had mined his wide reading for story ideas, and Tommy now does it for Demon ….
But Tommy is no stooge. He’s no less than a hero for Demon, having all the goodness Demon thinks is completely lacking in himself. However… we’re in the final quarter of the book now, and between now and the end Kingsolver needs him to start gaining some self-esteem. He has a long way to go—he can see his life is falling apart—but important people tell him he’s better than he knows. There has already been Annie, who tells him he’s the one that she, as an art teacher, always hoped she would find. And, as these chapters unfold, there are Tommy, Emmy, June, Angus…. I’ll come back to all of them…
…because as readers we’re already judging for ourselves. Moving in with Dori was the worst thing he could have done, but he has no intention of leaving her. She is now no better than a millstone, but meanwhile she’s made an almost perfect transfer from David Copperfield. First, Kingsolver does a better job than Dickens to make her main character’s infatuation seem plausible. She’s helped by the up-front sexual—and drug-driven—nature of the relationship. This lets her get rid of what feels like a big plot-hole in Dickens’s novel—when Dora becomes pregnant in David Copperfield, we wonder how the pregnancy could possibly have come about, because Dora is as asexual as a doll. Kingsolver takes the opposite approach, having Demon frankly dazzled both by her sexual promise and the respite the drugs bring. Any misgivings? Nah. He wants her, and the drug aren’t only recreational. He still suffers from the chronic pain that got him addicted in the first place.
Meanwhile, David Copperfield’s Dora has another USP that Kingsolver can use, her hopeless incompetence in every way. Dickens has to work hard, largely through the tiresome farce of their domestic lives, to try to make it bearable for the reader. But for goodness’ sake. How to believe that a bright, ambitious young man would retain all his early adoration of this simpering airhead? it never works for me—whereas in Dori’s case, it does. Kingsolver stacks everything in her own favour, giving Dori a plausible back-story as the spoilt daddy’s girl all the other girls loved, stuck in an adolescent mentality through having to leave school to look after—and dote on—her terminally ill father. By the time Demon comes along she’s emotionally still a child, but he isn’t looking any further than her mesmerising sexuality. At worst, there’s nothing to dislike in her because, well, why? She doesn’t judge, she doesn’t ever criticise—because reaching any kind of judgment would take the kind of joined-up reasoning she’s a stranger to.
Meanwhile, unlike David, Demon can see all too clearly that his darling’s limitations are going to be very bad indeed for both of their futures. This is the literal truth. Not only has Dori never needed to learn any life skills, she hasn’t even learnt the most rudimentary skills of day-to-day survival. He doesn’t regret having left Coach Winfield’s house, partly because he can see Angus needed to make her own life. She’s off to college soon, so she will never again be the ultra-supportive older sister. Then, she might have mocked his super-jock dating habits but only she could ever talk to him when he needed it. Now, Demon is getting into a lot of different drugs with Dori, some for the pain and the rest because it’s the only good thing they do together.
Dori begins doing so much junk she can’t hold down her hair salon job, and Demon often finds her overdosing on cut-open high-dose patches when he gets home. He becomes seriously worried that he won’t have what it takes to keep her safe. Tommy has already made it clear to him she’s taking everything out of him—not that Demon thanks him for their little chat—and Aunt June tells him she regrets she couldn’t keep him from the same downward cycle as his mother. Meanwhile, he carries on doing what he does, hoping Dori will find some reason to get out of the spiral—when, as spaced-out as ever one time, she tells him she’s pregnant. At last, Demon thinks, she’ll make an attempt to stay sober. As if. It just means he tries to be more strict with her, and she tells him he doesn’t love her any more….
Meanwhile… June has never given up on finding Emmy. But unlike Peggotty in David Copperfield, she can’t drop everything to search for her on her own. When she gets a lead, she enlists Demon and her younger brother—he’s all fancy talk and likes showing off his fancy-looking gun, but he ‘s cluelsess about anything—to drive the six hours to Atlanta. They find her, almost (but not quite) as starved-looking and spaced-out as Dori, Fast Forward has left her almost literally for dead. She has an even worse self-esteem problem than Demon, and says Hammer was always too good for her. But she also tells Demon that he and Hammer have the same ‘metal’ in them. Demon doesn’t believe it, obviously… But at least Emmys safe. June has got her into a high-end, effective rehab unit—she’ll be there a long time—and it’s before she goes that she tells Demon what Tommy and June have already told him about the qualities he doesn’t think he has.
But Kingsolver has a lot of other plot-threads to get through. Dori loses the baby in a hellish scene that is as far away from Dickens as you would expect—you should see the blood–and, having said the same to Demon as Dora says to David about how a short-lived childish romance would have been better for both of them—I’m paraphrasing—she dies, far more plausibly than Dora. But, like Dora’s, her death is necessary for the main character’s development. As is the dog’s. Dori’s dies, just like Dora’s… except not. Demon has to rescue his body from a refuse-sack during the industrial-scale clean-up of Dori’s house by the heartless relatives.
Demon is homeless, and lives out of Dori’s old car. He drifts, but not for long. He ignores his phone while zoning out (or assisting in some small-scale misdemeanour) with Maggot and another drop-out, but when he finally answers it’s Angus. U-Haul has been obsessing over her for years, and he’s now trying to force himself on her. If she refuses, he’ll trade on all the dirt he’s stacked up against Coach. When Demon picks up, she’s refusing U-Haul’s groping, slithering advances, and Demon drives over to stop him, just in time. U-Haul gleefully tells Demon all about the trouble Coach is about to get into when he exposes all the fraud he’s uncovered. Safe in a locked car—U-Haul’s—Angus explains how U-Haul has overseen the bookkeeping for years. He’s been regularly salting away some of the embezzled money into his mother’s bank account. If U-Haul isn’t finished, he soon will be—just like Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.
Next. The big set-piece scene when Fast Forward—with none of the heroics of Steerforth’s death in David Copperfield—meets his end and Hammer dies trying to save him. It doesn’t take place in the sea, but at the place Demon has definitely never wanted to visit. And instead of the biggest storm in memory stirring up a ship-wrecking hurricane, it’s summer flash floods that make the Devil’s Punchbowl the most dangerous place in the world. The writing is melodramatic, full of unfortunate twists, and perfect for what Kingsolver wants to do. Rose Dartell meets Demon, possibly not accidentally, and suggests he come to see Fast Forward where he is now living with his latest hapless lover. With Maggot in the car, he follows Rose’s car there, but Fast Forward isn’t at home. He’s gone to—you know where—and despite all the alarm-bells ringing, he decides to go to see what his ex-hero wants from him.
And from now on it’s a catalogue of unlucky chances—Hammer on the roadside with a flat tyre, a flash flood that washes away the lug-nuts as Demon changes it, Hammer on a drug he’s never had before, offered to him by the idiotic Maggot, Hammer clutching his beloved rifle—only because, Demon suggests, it’s worth more than the truck—and Hammer hearing about Fast Forward and wanting to confront him about what he did to Emmy…. So far, not so bad. Hammer just wants to tell Fast Forward what he thinks of him—but Fast Forward is at the top of the bluff, and Hammer starts to take off his gun-strap so he can climb up unhampered. But. But but but… as Fast Forward’s long-time sidekick returns from an unlucky pee-break he thinks he sees Hammer getting ready to use the rifle. He warns Fast Forward, who ducks, loses his footing, and plunges to what Demon can see is a head-smashing death. But Hammer can’t see Fast Forward is dead, plunges in to rescue him… and the rest is sadness and loss. Two young men dead, and Demon as close to rock bottom as he’s ever been.
He’s taken to hospital, but Rose Dartell wants revenge. She wants to blame Demon for the death, but she can’t. Maggot, on the other hand…. She saw him give Hammer an illegal drug…. Later, Maggot ends up being charged as an accessory to his death and his sent to juvenile detention. Aunt June always expected something like this—although not quite so serious—and hopes the sentence will do him good. She knows he’ll never really change… but she also knows Demon is different. She’ll help put him through rehab, and he pretends to accept the offer while deciding to cut and run. Which he does—just like David in Dickens’s novel, who goes to live in the Alps for a year or so. (I’m not making that up, and I was hating both David and Dickens by this point.) Demon doesn’t have so long, so he goes to some mountains he remembers from one of his darker foster-kid moments, realises within hours that there’s nothing for him there… and he goes back do what he needs to do.
Demon moves to Knoxville to enter rehab and get sober. We’re on the home straight now, and Kingsolver scoots past three years in which Demon draws on those resources he never realised he had. The best part about it is the other people, especially the legless ex-soldier whose basketball days are definitely not over. His resilience—he’s in a wheelchair team now—is a lesson for Demon, and we might wonder what kind of improving moral text we’re reading now…. It doesn’t matter, because Kingsolver has other nods to make towards Dickens’s novel. The Tommy Waddell thread is identical, except Demon can poach Tommy’s skeleton trade-mark by incorporating them into more serious-minded critiques of corporate exploitation in the region. Like David, he’s a proper writer now, albeit with Tommy’s help, because graphic novels are serious business in the early 21st Century. Annie loves his stuff, he’s getting a real following—and one of his biggest fans is Angus. Ah.
That’s the last piece to be fitted in. David-like, he’s still thinking of Angus as his sister—and, Betsy Trotwood-like, his grandmother has told him Angus has ‘set her cap’ at somebody she isn’t going to name. But over the course of a single day—Angus is doing a final clear-out of the big house, now on the market—she gets him to realise his mistake. She eases him into understanding how important he has always been to their little family and she gets him to understand why she always played the tomboyish part she did in a house fixated on football. And soon, just like in a Victorian novel, all the loose ends are tied up, and he can drive with Angus to—to where? To the ocean, of course, knowing the coast will be empty of tourists in winter. And… even the final sentence has a nuanced meaning. Demon can’t drown, right? But that isn’t what he’s talking about. ‘That’s where we are. Headed for the one big thing I know is not going to eat me alive.’
Barbara Kingsolver, like Dickens, can welcome her hero to a life of the kind of creative success she knows all about. Meanwhile Angus is clever, loving and will have her own successes. They will have enough health insurance for Demon to get his knee fixed, and the pain and poverty he has known will be no more than a memory. She, Kingsolver, must have enjoyed playing to Victorian rules. That way, everybody’s happy.
We can read it for you wholesale 