Barbara Kingsolver may not have conceived of Demon Copperhead in the most conventional of ways, but when the novel co-won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, readers were far from taken aback. That the book is a reimagining of Dickens’s 19th-century novel David Copperfield is secondary; what is more important is its central theme. The contemporary opioid crisis of the Appalachians in America is a motif compelling enough to make the average peruser of literature sit up straight. Add to that the (slightly spooky) circumstances that led Kingsolver to write the novel in the first place — three years to write a little more than 500 pages — and we have a novel that is equal parts fiction, derived from devout admiration, and an accurate reflection of contemporary societal politics.
Kingsolver says the idea of the novel came to her straight from the “ghost” of Charles Dickens on a particularly mysterious night at the Bleak House Inn in England, where she had been holidaying with her husband. She recounts the night with a touch of awe in her voice. “It was very strange. I just saw this place online and thought it would be fun (to visit)… to be honest, they had really good oysters, and I love oysters. So I thought, ‘I’ll just go and I’ll have some good oysters and I’ll stay in this funny house.’” What she didn’t expect was to have the spirit of Charles Dickens “speak” to her in the study of Bleak House — the same Bleak House in which the author wrote David Copperfield and planned his eponymous novel Bleak House; the same study in which his own literary endeavours were undertaken back in the 19th century. “I distinctly heard him say to me, ‘Let the child tell the story. Let him tell it for himself.’ And it’s so unnerving that this happened in that very strange way, that I felt the outrage of Charles Dickens, and the fact that he did help me, very successfully, to do exactly what I wanted to do,” Kingsolver explains.
The idea of “translating” David Copperfield had been preying on the author’s mind for a long time before she visited Bleak House. “I had had the idea of translating David Copperfield into modern times, but I didn’t really know how it would work,” she confesses. “But once I had that experience, I was surprised, actually, by how translatable the whole thing was; that I could just lay out my chapters directly on top of David Copperfield, follow the plot, use the characters and extract this universal theme of inherited poverty.” After the “ghost” made an appearance, Hamlet-style, Kingsolver says she fled to the room she and her husband had checked into, and wrote well into the night.
“It almost frightens me to think about it now,” she says, shuddering. “The fact that I just went (to Bleak House) on a whim. It was not planned at all; I had no expectations. And then this remarkable thing happened, and I began this project of writing a modern David Copperfield… and it worked out so wonderfully. But had I not gone there, had I changed my mind and gone instead to stay somewhere else, there would be no Demon Copperhead today. It scares me sometimes,” Kingsolver admits. “We think we’re in control of our lives, but we’re really not. Our lives are made (of far stranger stuff than that).”
THE LONG SHOT OF LITERATURE
While on the subject of control, we can’t help but prod further. The fact that most novels tend to end up very differently from what authors have in mind when they start to write them is a truth universally acknowledged. Does Kingsolver think her works are more argumentative or exploratory?
The answer comes easily. The author usually begins each of her novels with a question, one she tells us she never really has an answer for, but which seems important to her all the same. But she makes it clear that her works are indeed explorations, and that her intention “isn’t to provide an answer for the reader, but to bring the reader into this question, to interrogate a subject along with me and provide them with the possibility of answering it for themselves”. The opening question, then, becomes the central theme, a recurrent motif throughout the novel, which Kingsolver hopes will keep the reader on their toes and continue to engage them even when the story comes to an end.
“Literature is made of questions, of interrogations. I think that it’s really important to preserve in literature that feeling of inviting the reader to walk for a while and think about things rather than providing simple answers or solutions,” she tells us. Kingsolver is also adamant that despite the overwhelming presence of the question, the existence of the answer itself is far less convincing. “What really gets me is, you do all this work to be subtle and to explore (in your writing), and then somebody says, ‘Well, what’s your book about?’ Or, ‘In one sentence, what do you want me to take away from this book?’ And I just think, you don’t get it. You don’t know what literature is. If I could give it to you in a sound byte, I wouldn’t have spent the last three years writing 500 pages!”
Five hundred pages is not enough for Demon Copperhead, my own copy of which spans 530 pages. No mean feat for any author, but then again, we must take into consideration the gravity of its central theme. The book touches on themes of social and economic stratification in Kingsolver’s native Appalachia, child poverty in rural America, and drug addiction with a focus on the opioid crisis that has disproportionately ravaged the Appalachian region, turning many of its communities into the epicentre of the United States’ raging drug epidemic. It is a complex crisis rooted in economic decline, high injury rates, and predatory pharmaceutical practices, many of which are depicted to a disturbingly accurate degree in the novel. If anything, the story of Demon Copperhead is that much harder-hitting because it reflects to an unsettling level the sheer abuse and addiction that people of the region undergo.
What, we ask, was the primary reason to set the book in her own native land — surely it must be more than to simply represent the community’s everyday realities? “The author’s moral responsibility is also to acknowledge small-town communities and represent them well,” Kingsolver tells us. “I live in a rural place. I’m a rural person, born and raised and still. And we are profoundly underrepresented in culture. In fact, if I try to think about one television show or one movie I’ve seen in the last 20 years that genuinely and respectfully represents rural life, I can’t think of one. Rural people don’t see ourselves on television, in the movies, in magazines, in the news, because it’s become very centralised and it’s all made in cities, mostly in California and New York. So we feel invisible, and there’s a lot of anger in my country. And it’s not even that everybody living in the country is poor, for that matter. Some farmers — there are middle-class farmers, there are farmers who are doing okay — but even they are not on television. (Kingsolver and her family themselves live on a farm, growing their own food and tending to their animals). And I think that has created a political divide in our country that has become very, very dangerous. There’s a perceived lack of respect for rural people that has made them so angry that they were vulnerable and ready to vote for the first guy who came along to say, ‘I’m not fancy, I’m just a regular guy, I’m kind of coarse, I’m kind of crude, but I’m on your side.’ Of course, he’s not,” Kingsolver shrugs. “He just wants money, but people were desperate. They were ready to vote to blow up the system. And I get where that anger comes from, really.”
LEARNING TO LOOK AGAIN
Surely that leads us to the question of whether literature can do anything at all to bridge the aforementioned divide, or if it can, at the very least, complicate and simultaneously untangle the easy stereotypes people tend to lean on. Kingsolver is careful not to make grand messianic claims for her novel — books don’t pass laws, she reminds us, and they don’t fix broken systems overnight. But they do something stronger, albeit quiet, and, in the long run, much more subversive: they insist on attention. If Demon Copperhead has a political effect, we believe, it is not because it argues a case like a manifesto, but because it makes indifference — especially towards complex social issues — harder to sustain. Readers come away with a knowledge of voices, from both sides of the gap, that are difficult to ignore.
We ask Kingsolver whether she has ever had an encounter with a reader that has left her convinced of the innate — underlying, faint, but very much alive — goodness of the world. The quality that bubbles forth to a certain extent in even the worst of us, the one that urges us to protect the weak and the wronged. We wonder if there is a question she has been asked that has stayed with her, if she has seen attempts at redemption spring forth from the souls of those whose hearts have been touched by her work. Kingsolver thinks for a minute. “I once spoke with a bunch of high-school kids who had all read Demon Copperhead, and I just mostly wanted to talk with them instead of lecturing or reading,” she says thoughtfully. “So I said, ‘Let’s just talk and ask questions, and you can ask me questions’. I always learn from these sessions, too, because kids have interesting insights, so I was curious what they would want to know. So then this boy raises his hand, and he says, ‘I belong to a comics club’. They’re all boys, see, all these boys who read comics and get together in their little club and talk about comics. And he asks me, ‘Do superheroes have a duty to protect small towns as well as cities?’ That was pretty profound, I thought. It has several steps to it, too. For one thing, the presumption he has that superheroes are very real. Secondly, that superheroes have a moral code or a sense of ethics.” She pauses for a bit to break into a chuckle. “But of course, I said, they sure do. That was a good question.”
Picking up from the concept of superheroes, does Kingsolver think the world is divided into clean moral camps? The author shakes her head. It’s important to enter any situation with an open mind, she tells us — we must do more than simply look twice, do more than outright refuse the easy answer. “It’s imperative to pay attention. Just be curious,” she says seriously. For fiction writers especially, Kingsolver believes, curiosity must extend beyond observation into something deeper — it must be almost uncomfortable, or one tends to end up doing injustice to oneself. “Put your heart into every side of an argument, because good and evil does not make a good story,” she says. “It makes a good movie, but a novel has to be much more nuanced than that. And it’s so important for a character to understand that nobody is all good or all bad, and that even the people who seem to be doing very bad things believe that they’re doing the right thing. So to be able to inhabit that mentality, to cultivate that much compassion, will make you a better writer, and it’ll make you a better person for it.”
It is perhaps in this spirit, too, that Kingsolver speaks about travelling and about listening to stories from around the world; about what it means to encounter places that are not one’s own without turning them into postcards or exotic metaphors. Having herself lived a migratory youth, she is filled with the wisdom of the well-travelled, and the knowledge that places are lived-in worlds of their own, each with its own stubborn, irreducible truths. We ask her about what she thinks of Calcutta — her trip for the Exide Kolkata Literary Meet — and her country-dwelling heart overflows. “How glorious it is to visit a place I feel like I have always known thanks to the books I’ve read about it,” she muses. “The first time, I didn’t really get to see much of it, because I was working and I didn’t have time to explore, so I didn’t get to know the city very well. But I’ve really enjoyed getting the feel of it this time. For example, the culture of fish, and the warmth of Calcutta… I’ve been very impressed with this city.
“I’m not very fond of the smog, though,” she says, disapproving. “It’s hard to breathe. It made me a little sad. Coming down in the airplane and seeing this haze… I feel badly for people who live in haze, and I feel badly for the trees.” Her voice softens. “We went to the Botanical Garden, spent a morning there, and I loved it. I love nature, and we saw beautiful birds and beautiful trees. This is a city of trees. It’s so green, all the trees are so beautiful here, but I just want to dust them off! But, you know, that’s life, and I know that wherever you are, you adjust to things.”
There is wisdom in that statement, too.
We ask Kingsolver whether she has been enjoying the local food, and are hit with a barrage of enthusiasm. “The culture here is based on fish, and it’s very tasty!” she tells us. “And I love the sweets. What is it called again… mishti? We went to a dinner last night, and they gave us a heavy box full of it. I didn’t know what was in the box, but I took it back to the hotel, and I said, ‘Well, it must be edible’. And I took a bite, and I’m in love! So, this morning when I woke up, I got a cup of coffee and a mishti! It’s the perfect breakfast. And I’m not even a dessert person!”
A bright note to wrap the conversation on. And how compelling is the power of the humble Bengali mishti — various and vast, bringing nationalities together without grand ceremony — much akin to literature, to stories… to the long, patient tradition of the child who tells his own tale.