Demon Copperhead and Bearing Witness

When fictional characters live through real events

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

IN The Art of Fiction, novelist John Gardner wrote, “The true writer’s fundamental concern—his reason for finding a subject interesting in the first place—is likely to be humane. He sees injustice or misunderstanding in the world around him, and he cannot keep it out of his story.”

One has to think this sort of impetus was behind Barbara Kingsolver’s latest epic, Demon Copperhead, which sets a coming-of-age story against the rise of the opioid epidemic in Appalachia. Kingsolver is herself a daughter of the region, raised in Kentucky and now a resident of rural southwest Virginia, where Demon Copperhead – a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield – takes place.

Kingsolver told the New York Times that while conceptualizing this novel, she stayed at Bleak House, the cliffside home-turned-bed-and-breakfast where Dickens wrote David Copperfield. “I sat at his desk and I just started communing with Dickens,” she said. “I thought about how ‘David Copperfield’ was his own story, and I’m thinking we’re in the same boat. I’m sure the polite Victorians did not want to hear about poorhouses and orphanages and yet they were waiting each month for the next installment. I asked him, ‘How do I do that?’ And he said: ‘Let the kid tell the story. No one doubts the child.’” 

And that’s what she did in creating Demon and allowing him to tell his story. “First, I got myself born,” he says to us in the novel’s opening sentence. This is both tongue-in-cheek and intentional on Kingsolver’s part; we know no child bears responsibility for their conception, the circumstances of their birth, or the identity of their parents, and our sympathies are with Demon from this first line. “But damn,” he says a few pages later. “A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it’s easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you’ve ended up someplace you’re proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy.”

I can’t say this novel is “about” the opioid crisis any more than Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones is “about” Hurricane Katrina or Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone is “about” 9/11. These books are about people – children, families – who live through these events. As Christopher Bram writes in The Art of History, “in most successful books about history, fiction and nonfiction, the story is in the foreground and the details are neatly woven into it.” And the best details, he says, “are like double knots of character and time: they tie us to both the people and the age they live in. But there are also profound details that do triple duty, offering a glimpse into something larger, the society or religion or philosophy of the time.”

Demon is wonderfully observant. He carries the hard-earned astuteness of anyone who has grown up in a volatile environment, a kid who must always be attuned to his mother’s level of sobriety and his stepfather’s propensity for violence. He reveals the story to us as a character who is both a child and therefore learning as he goes, and as a person living through a historic moment when something big is happening around him. He says to us of one heart-breaking moment when he was 10, “Believe it or not, I had to ask. What’s oxy?”

The opioid crisis has been with us now for more than a quarter-century. After the 1996 FDA approval of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma began to aggressively – and fraudulently – promote the drug as a less-addictive pain management solution. In 2022, the Stanford–Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis reported that 600,000 people have died from opioid overdoses since 1999. Without urgent intervention, 1.2 million more are likely to die by the end of this decade. Kingsolver absorbed this monumental, slow-rolling, profit-driven tragedy and perhaps again conjured John Gardner: “We read of a woman in Chicago who threw her father out the window of her sixth-floor apartment. ‘How in the world could such a terrible thing have come about?’ we exclaim, and the novelist’s business is to show us, step by step, what happened.”

To what end does the novelist do this work? We tell stories to entertain, surely. Stories are pleasurable because they transport us and make us feel, even when those feelings are sadness, fear, anger. At the same time, Adrienne Rich’s lines ring true: “Poetry never stood a chance / of standing outside history.” If fictional characters can be added to the ranks of effective child advocates, Demon might join Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, the teenaged survivors of the Parkland massacre. He bears witness in the world of the novel, and through him Kingsolver bears witness to all that comprises Appalachia itself: joy, loss, injustice, poverty, love, hope. As Bram says, this novel lets what’s known – the existence of a decades-long crisis – become mystery again, and therein is the story.

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William Brewer’s poetry collection I Know Your Kind is set three hours north in Oceana, West Virginia, a coal mining town dismally nicknamed Oxyana. Like Demon Copperhead, the collection aims to give voice to a people and place forever changed by the influx of opioids. I Know Your Kind reads a bit like the first book of poetry I ever loved, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, in which residents of a small town speak to us from beyond the grave. Brewer’s speakers are alive, mostly, but the epidemic has consumed them, directly or indirectly. While Demon Copperhead relies on the intimacy of a single first-person narrator to tell a broader story, here the impact comes from a chorus of voices: people using and people relapsing, residents of rehabs and halfway houses, their families, their friends. The final stanzas of “The Messenger of Oxyana”:

…ask the honest cold
how to drive now to her home,

knock and sit and decline a tea
and say that I have held a mirror
beneath her brother’s nose and watched

its glass go undisturbed by breath,
I have held the still hive of his head,
have placed my lips against the shadow

of his mouth, screamed air into his chest,
watched it rise like an empire then fall
into that one and stupid sleep.

Brewer, who grew up in West Virginia, said in an interview that “I’ve been coming and going from WV for a decade. I’d leave for a few months, come back, meet up with people at a bar and they’d say, This person is hooked or This person is dealing, I’d stay for a month, observe, leave, come back, and see more changes. This created a system of contrasts, almost a system of measurement, that made very clear the severity of the situation. These observations would simmer in me, building and combining, and then a poem would arrive through a voice—again, that fiction impulse. Essentially none of them are in my voice.”

The poem that might come closest is “Today I Took You to Our Oxyana High School Reunion,” which begins “It was held in the gymnasium / which was full of coffins / full of smaller coffins / full of Oxys.” It ends with “a classmate walked up / and pointed at you / in the urn I cradled like an infant / said that motherfucker / stole forty bucks from me. / I offered him a twenty / I said I’m sorry / it’s all we have.”

Whether from a lone first-person narrator or an entire community speaking at once, specificity is the enemy of the stereotypical and polemic. Fully inhabiting a fictional character or poetic personas, as Kingsolver and Brewer do, leads readers to a more primal understanding – and the kind of radical empathy we discussed in the last Literary Citizen.

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As a person who spent a decade trying to get Congress to focus on one of America’s entrenched crises, in my case affordable housing, it can be extremely difficult to draw action on an issue absent an acute disaster. By that I mean a derailed train of poisonous chemicals perhaps, or a failed mid-tier bank, though even high-profile events like these are unlikely to spur lasting policy change. It is a win that there has been any accountability at all on the peddling of opioids.

In 2021, after much litigation, Purdue Pharma was dissolved. In a settlement with several states’ attorneys general, the Sackler family will pay $4.5 billion over nine years, most of which is to go to addiction treatment and prevention programs. Just last week, Laurence F. Doud III, chief executive of Rochester Drug Cooperative Inc. and the first pharmaceutical distributor to face federal charges, was sentenced to two years in prison for his role in filling pharmacies with opioids despite knowing that they were “diverting the drugs and supplying them to addicts.” But the Purdue settlement protected the Sacklers from most additional liability, leaving them one of the wealthiest families in the country. And though loss of life cannot be quantified, the cost of the opioid epidemic far exceeds the settlement. Some economists put it in the trillions.

Our past, as Bram says, bleeds into our present. And the past has a past. As Demon says, “You think you know where your own troubles lie, only to stare down the page and realize, no. Not there. It started earlier. Like these wars going back to George Washington and whiskey.”

I Know Your Kind contains a poem that feels like the whole town has something to tell us: “Have you ever seen so many cold faces / slapped in the afternoon? / So many voices screaming—Wake up.”

Wake up. That is what both these works ask of us. This is ultimately the goal of bearing witness, whether we are writing novels or poems, or filming police brutality, or testifying to any number of abuses. To not only say it happened – it’s happening – but to ask what we will do now that we know.