Living the American Nightmare/Dream

It's been a while since a work of fiction has touched me on so many different levels and kept me riveted to its pages, but Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. did just that.  It is beautifully written and conceived and is at once the American nightmare and the American dream even though it gets its inspiration from the classic British novel David Copperfield by Charles DIckens.  It was listed as one of the top 10 novels of 2022 by both the Washington Post and New York Times.  It has personal resonance from my experience as a foster parent and living in North Carolina where the impact of the Opioid crisis on the rural poor is hard to escape when one travels west towards the Appalachian mountains. The novel's narrator and protagonist Damon Fields known as Demon Copperhead offers a insightful and honest description from a child's view of all that happens to him which would be absolutely tragic if it weren't for his tremendous resilience and smarts in the face of one traumatic experience after another.  Being born in a single wide trailer to a father who died before he was born and a drug addicted mother is a tough start. But his early years were bare-able.  His neighbors were a family who looked after him and invited him over often for warm meals.  In this family was also his earliest best friend whom he played with for hours out in nature everyday.  Demon loves the beauty and expansive freedom of the mountains of Lee County, Virginia and it this setting that is a core part of what makes him feel human.  Yet, it is the humans, good, evil and mediocre that have the biggest impact on him as he is thrust into the foster care system when his mother dies of an overdose.  Kingsolver provides a damning account of a foster care system that can't even provide the basic needs of food and shelter.  Her description of Demon's hunger and malnutrition in his first years is painful to read as he is used by inept foster parents as a source of income and child labor.  His slow and inevitable addiction to Opioids is another gut-wrenching part of this novel.  And yet he meets so many good people along the way. There's Mr. Armstrong, a middle school history teacher and counselor who recognizes Demon is gifted and his wife Annie, a high school art teacher who offers him a safe place to spend everyday to develop his budding ability as a comic artist.   There are his peers Angus and Tommy whose friendships save him time and again.  And then there is June, the mother figure who is always attuned to his needs from a young age and eventually gets him in a rehab program that saves his life. 

The power of this novel is how deftly Kingsolver brings you into a rural community that has been absolutely devastated first by the coal mines and then by the Opioid crisis. It is thoroughly researched and accurately depicts a time frame starting in the 90s when the Opioid Crisis went into full swing.   It is truly the American nightmare where greedy corporations destroy a vulnerable community, but Demon Copperhead's poignant narration of his ability to beat the odds is also a nod to the American Dream.