In her 34-year career,Kingsolver has told many big stories with strong social and political themes. She’s won numerous awards for her 18 books,notablyThe Poisonwood Bible andThe Lacuna,and prizes for her body of work include the National Humanities Medal,the highest US honour for service through the arts. ButDemon Copperhead is perhaps her most ambitious novel yet,with a theme of nothing less than where and how her country has failed its children.
“This novel is full of hard truths about the United States of America and about Appalachia where we live,and what a low priority the country places on anything to do with kids,” she says. Demon is one of many such disadvantaged children:born in a trailer to a drug-addicted single mother,bullied by a stepfather,farmed out to disastrous foster homes. For a while it looks as if he’s found his redemption through playing football,but an injury sends him on the road to hell.
Hell is opioid addiction,and Kingsolver depicts it in all its horror. “Everything that happens to Demon has happened in real life to someone I know,” she says. “Someone has been lost to an overdose,or has completely imploded in a way that often destroys a whole family.” In her research she talked to recovering addicts – “I would sit and cry with them” – and found out how you take a pill into your veins. Some of the stories made her skin crawl.
But the real evil of this addiction,she says,is how it always begins with a legally prescribed painkiller. Overworked doctors are singled out by drug companies that reassure them the pills are safe. “Nobody wants to become addicted. It’s a terrible disease that changes your brain permanently. If your daughter has cancer,you’re not going to say:‘We’re going to use tough love’. You can’t treat drug-addicted people that way.”
Why is opioid addiction such a huge epidemic in Appalachia? It’s part of a history of exploitation. Kingsolver loves the rural mountainous region,which takes in parts of Kentucky,Virginia and Tennessee. She grew up in rural Kentucky and moved back to southwestern Virginia when she and her husband took on their farm. But she’s also acutely aware that the people of the region have long been preyed on.
“The coal companies took over not just the economy but the government. They controlled the schools and kicked out other industries for over a century. So,generation after generation had to work in the mines. And then the companies laid off workers,so now there are hardly any left.”
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The myth about Appalachians says it’s all their own fault. They’re a lazy,feckless,ignorant lot,constantly mocked in popular culture,labelled hillbillies or rednecks or poor white trash. Demon falls for this stereotype too,until a few good people in his life show him otherwise.
Kingsolver is sad that many of the most oppressed people in the region have voted for Donald Trump,a president who did nothing to help them,but she can understand why they did. “People have been traumatised by a lot of what’s happened,and trauma affects the brain in ways that leave them prone to black-and-white,all-or-nothing thinking.
“Donald Trump really preyed on this. The one thing he’s good at is manipulating people who are frightened,angry and at the end of their rope.”
Does she have faith that fiction like hers can change things? For her,it’s all done at the reader level. “When it’s done well,a novel takes its reader out of her own life and puts her into another person’s brain. There’s no other art form that does that. It’s a superpower,it’s almost scary.
“So I think carefully about where I’m going to put the reader,and why. I also respect people’s time. If you’re going to spend 10 hours being other people,I want to make it worth your while. I want to entertain you,but also for you to come back out of the book into your life having felt something you didn’t think you needed.”
Demon Copperhead is published by Faber&Faber at $32.99.
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