[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.
We can read it for you wholesale 