An excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver’s World, Revised Edition by Linda Wagner-Martin
Demon Copperhead
In recent interviews, Kingsolver has frequently introduced the theme that she loves her adopted territory of Appalachia (growing up in Kentucky put her near this region but not precisely in it). Once she married Stephen Hopp and eventually moved to his small farm, the Kingsolver women (Barbara and her daughter Camille) were Appalachians. When Lily was born, she too became Appalachian. As Kingsolver notes after calling the published Demon Copperhead “a love letter to Appalachia,” “Everybody laughed at Appalachia, so I wanted to write about the people, the community. It’s a joke (think about James Dickey’s Deliverance) or it’s a poverty documentary. Needs nuance, the suppressed culture of education. We are not dumb. Extractive industry has curtailed our progress. I wanted to write about the orphaning of our children. Lee County was the epicenter, the beginning point of the opioid raging/destruction” (Official web “The Origin Project”). And when Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in May of 2023, Kingsolver repeated the connection she had created between Appalachia and Demon’s story: “I wrote this book for my people because we are so invisible to the rest of the world and so persistently misrepresented.”
Such emphasis is not unusual for Kingsolver: she has long explained that she writes only about places she knows well. As she had insisted in the Noah Adams NPR interview:
When researching a setting you have to know a lot more about a place than you can learn from looking at pictures. You have to know what it smells like after a rain. You have to know the quality of the air, how it feels on your face. You have to know what is blooming in May and how that has changed by July. And you have to know how people are, how they talk (Adams, 18)
More recently in her web autobiography she insists again, “I almost never set a fictional scene in a place unless I’ve been there …. Fiction is invention but it’s ultimately about truth.
This author’s readers remember her essay “The Memory Place” as she thinks about her native Kentucky and compares its lands to “a jigsaw puzzle of public and private property that is the Kentucky watershed.” That essay opens:
This is the kind of April morning no other month can touch: a world tinted in watercolor pastels of redbud, dogtooth violet, and gentle rain. The trees are beginning to shrug off winter; the dark, leggy maple woods are shot through with gleaming constellations of soft white dogwood blossoms. The road winds through deep forest near Cumberland Falls, Kentucky, carrying us across the Cumberland Plateau toward Horse Lick Creek. Camille is quiet beside me in the front seat, until at last she sighs and says, with a child’s poetic logic, “This reminds me of a place I always like to think about” (p. 170)
1 People in Places: Children as Focus
Scenes are seldom unpeopled in Kingsolver’s essays or fiction. Here her daughter Camille adds the heart to Kentucky as heartland. In Demon Copperhead, readers must understand the tenuous hold on life that the baby Devon must grasp. It is all of a piece. Yet Kingsolver takes on another kind of economic and wasteland social problem novel as she works her way through this Appalachian construct. As did Unsheltered, her 2022 novel Demon Copperhead takes on the worlds of injustice marked by financial angst, of uneasy—or perhaps irrelevant—moral quandaries. To these she adds the raging opioid crises—Kingsolver has never before attempted depicting the drug culture—but this crisis is one of downhome origins. It becomes an accessory to, if not a result of, other kinds of social and cultural pain.
More of Kingsolver’s attention in her web autobiography, however, is about the way she experienced returning to the Appalachian farms and woods once she had married her second husband and was moving back from the West. She laments leaving Arizona, saying it “was not easy to leave behind. I am grateful for my twenty-five years in the Southwestern borderland, where I meant to spend a few months and instead became a writer, mother, and citizen of the world. Equally welcome to me, though, has been a return to the eastern deciduous woodlands of my childhood and the polite, inflected accent that is my first language. The year of our move, we remodeled a hundred-year-old farmhouse, renovated fields and orchards and established flocks of poultry and Icelandic sheep …” (Official web 4).
She writes elsewhere in her web autobiography about what she calls today’s “cultural rifts” In the country, the divisions between “the mobile, highly educated” versus “those prioritizing family roots and respect for manual labor.” In another paired contrast she describes “devotees of science and innovation” versus “those trusting tradition and spiritual practice.” Further, in her introduction to Arwen Donahue’s Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year (2023), Kingsolver complains that “Generational memory seems to have fed a modern assumption that manual labor is for the wretched, and farm life is something to be escaped …. There is so much more to the story. It’s a kind of mission work to explain that land itself holds wisdom, and grace comes from reading it every day” (Official web, March 30, 2023).
For all her emphasis on place and culture, however, Kingsolver signals her readers that Demon Copperhead is primarily a novel about a child. To make this point, for one of the first times in writing any of her fiction—short stories or long—Kingsolver gives over the entire novel to the child the title names. The book opens, in the boy’s voice, “First, I got myself born.” Damon Fields, born to his teen-age, unmarried mother, is one of culture’s “lost boys,” and Kingsolver has previously given us a glimpse of those boys in her 2018 novel, Unsheltered. There Thatcher Greenwood, the nineteenth-century teacher, seeing the youngsters with their lunch buckets and dirty picks, thinks, “Worn at the edges already, these boys, and so young” (Unsheltered 76).
Living without the shelter of good homes, without education, without time to learn to play, she created hope for the truly parentless baby boy Dusty. She took that child no further than his first birthday, however. In her 2022 novel, that lost boy takes over the novel entirely.
Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Barbara Kingsolver’s World, is Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She was the 2011 recipient of the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service in American literature (sponsored by the MLA), and has received the Guggenheim fellowship, the senior National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, the Bunting Institute fellowship, and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Philosophical Association and others. She has published more than eighty-five books of criticism.