Kudos to the 2023 Pulitzer Prize Board for a totally worthy selection.  Kingsolver ticks a literary box by channeling Dickens and his David Copperfield without crass imitation, a societal significance box by addressing child poverty, abuse and the epidemic of rural drug use (especially opioid addiction, calling out some of the companies and their owners by name) and the readership box by creating a captivating and moving tale featuring flawed but valuable characters of realistic human color and complexity in an interesting land- and culture-scape.

The opening chapter or two induced a little hissy fit in this reader – knee-jerk objection to spending time with a self-destructive junky single mother and a narrator who seemed, at first, kind of stereotypically hillbilly.  The prize award was helpful then, inducing me to power through to where it began to dawn on my urban elitist New York-raised mind that the mother was not going to be our companion all the way through, the child/narrator quite a bit more self-aware than my prejudices first supposed, and the hillbilly voice (along with my dismissive reaction to it) was central to the moral view of the novel. Just as it is best not to judge political speech on the speaker’s accent, neither should the reader allow Demon’s voice, which cements him into his milieu, to obscure his story.

Kingsolver’s craft extends also to the novel’s plotting, following Demon’s trials and tribulations for long enough to make the reader feel his despair and self-doubt while every now and then throwing us the lifeline of a gentle soul or a positive experience before descending again into the long, slow slide.  By the time his fate takes its most significant downward turn (page 333 of 546) we are fully invested and watch the slow-motion pileup with horror until around 508 when a ray of sunshine begins to probe the rotted-out shutters of doom.  Even then, we’re on pins and needles till very nearly the end, hoping against hope that he will find it in himself to succeed and when he does, in the final twenty pages, the payoff brought tears to these eyes. 

I gather some readers have said that happy ending (one should say tentatively happy, having been reminded in the preceding pages of the regression statistics on addiction treatment) feels false and not credible, after all that came before, and it would certainly be possible for an author to have ended this story on the downbeat of despair.  Possible, but not as rewarding and not as true to the model’s modus operandi. Dickens too was writing to entertain a wide public and so needed to grant them the satisfaction of a good story with a rewarding culmination even as he fed them the unvarnished truths he believed they needed to hear.  His legacy over the intervening 175 years is sufficient to suggest that he, and now Kingsolver, made the correct choice in that.

As a writer one can well imagine the fun Kingsolver must have had transcribing character names into the nicknaming vernacular of mountain folk: David Copperfield to Demon Copperhead, James Steerforth to Fast Forward, Uriah Heap to U-Haul, etc.  While Mr. Micawber made a modest move to Mr. McCobb, the author seems to have hewn closer to model the more admirable the cast member:  Aunt Betsey gets the slimmest change of spelling as Aunt Betsy, the Peggety family becomes the Peggot clan and Dora morphs into Dori, still trying her young husband’s patience and love just as much despite the different vowel and dying an early tragic death as well.  Demon’s other romantic interest retains her original name, Agnes, despite being referred to throughout as Angus (for reasons the novel explains).  A further twist is necessary for her father, who in Dickens is Dr. Strong.  Since the physician in that part of the story will turn out to be a villain whose neglectful care and wrong-headed prescriptions start Demon on his steepest and deepest slide, Kingsolver names him Dr. Ward (as in ‘ward of,’ perhaps?) while Agnes’ father and Demon’s putative rescuer becomes the high school football team’s Coach Winfield – as in ‘win on the field,’ perpetuating Dickens’ own custom of punacious character names.  

Another interesting bit of craft regards how reticent the cover quotes and inside flap summary are (at least in the hardcover edition I read).  A potential reader would never know from them what a harrowing story they are in for.  One suspects that was a calculated choice, aiming for potential readers to be drawn in by Kingsolver’s previous commercial successes and the Pulitzer award so they would read far enough to become emotionally invested before seriously questioning whether or not to continue.

One could say a lot more, but I’ll just leave it that Demon Copperhead has already taken a prominent spot on the shelf so I’ll frequently glimpse its spine and be reminded that highly satisfying and truly worthwhile fiction is still possible – even in this age of internet, AI and attention spans measured in microseconds.