Dickensian Appalachia

The perennial problem with getting one’s hands on a new release by a favourite author, is the reining in of expectations, so as not to unfairly set up a novel for failure/disappointment. It is hard however, not to get excited when a new Kingsolver novel appears, and such a pretty one in this case, all blue and goldeny/copper colours on the cover! 

From the very first sentence, it is the writing voice of the first person narrator which immediately pulls the reader in. It is so much ‘of its place and time’ – that being the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, in the 90s – with its unique speech patterns and slang and cadences. It is a very poverty-stricken community, and Damon Copperhead, our protagonist, is just another such kid, born to a teenaged mother who is all alone and so vulnerable. He is of course deprived, while at first only vaguely realising he is. He is also very much a country kid, totally amazed at his first sight of a city: Knoxville. Kingsolver perfectly captures the shock of a child seeing an urban setting for the first time,

Only I had the idea you’d go round a corner and you’d be out of it. Back to where you’d see mountains, cattle pastures, and things of that kind, alive. No dice. Whenever Aunt June took us out, we’d drive down twenty or thirty streets with buildings only. If you’re one of those that still haven’t been, let me tell you what a city is. A hot mess not easily escaped.

p22

At ten years old, Damon is at once super-aware and super smart, and yet so achingly naïve. He knows what he community he is classed with being, “

rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.

p69

His reality – and school is already the better and easiest part of his life – is that

half the kids at school had to line up for their pills from the nurse every day before recess

p66

For all that, the community in Lee County is extremely tight knit and often inter-related. His neighbours, the Peggots, are extremely caring and much like an extended family, but when his mother does the classic thing of young-vulnerable-woman starry-eyed over a man who appears to have some prospects and so ends up marrying a man who enjoys intimidation, control, and abuse, then the 10-year old Damon suffers too, particularly when the Peggots are disbarred from helping and homing him.  

Having no other family, DDS or social services step in and Damon enters the foster care system, where he is routinely mistreated while everyone seemingly turns a blind eye to it or is helpless to rescue him. Child labour seems the norm in those communities, as is missing education, particularly amongst the more deprived children. However, in this novel, there are few outright villains, not even DDS or the community of Lee County. Kingsolver lays out the reality for such communities, who farm tobacco and may well be held in contempt for that, but she beautifully frames their harsh reality:

Our schools had smoking barrels. Teachers smoked on their breaks, kids at recess. […] Grow it with pride and smoke it with pride, they said, giving out bumper stickers to that effect. I recall big stacks of them at school free for the taking. Grow and smoke we did, while the price per pound went to hell and a carton got such taxes on it, we were smoking away our grocery money. We drove around with “Proud Tobacco Farmer” stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you’re standing on a small pile of shit fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

p103

As always, Kingsolver shows exactly just how the landscape and the lifestyle shapes the people and their culture, even when – or particularly when – it is a lifestyle that is self-destructive, because it has been exploited to the point of unsustainability; which pride will not permit the admission of. She is a master of picking up what most would consider detritus and seeing the value and worth of it, and more, getting the reader to see the same. She shows how this community has been devalued, to the point where they had little else left but pride;

Like every boy in Lee County I was raised to be a proud mule in a world that had scant use for mules.

p531

Indeed, in many of the stories within the community, characters (men and women alike) seem to prefer a life of abuse, beatings, destitution, starvation, and deprivation, rather than ask for help or admit they made a mistake or a poor judgement call. Perhaps in such a setting, pride comes to stand in for self-worth, and however bad one’s circumstances/situation, it becomes that one small pile of shit that they’d defend and stubbornly stand on. 

One of this novel’s most poignantly crafted chapters is when Damon’s mother dies, quite early on in the story. The chapter on her funeral was a study in simultaneous denial and confrontation, of great sorrow minus any shred of sentimentality. We see it all through the eyes of a furious prepubescent, the ironies of the situation overlaying the tragedy of the waste of a life; and with his mother’s death, the draining away of what little value he had held himself and his own life in. We see how a child deals with the magnitude of loss and grief which he cannot even articulate, let alone admit. Though what Kingsolver has Damon communicate is pretty eloquent:

Now I’d gone over to the side of pitiful, and you never saw a kid so wrecked. At the start of the service they did that song about Amazing God, and I felt exactly the opposite: I once could see but now I’m blind, was found but now I’m lost.” (p110).

The tawdriness of Damon’s mother’s life and existence, all that lost potential, total lack of recognition and validation, a life barely lived before it was snatched away and in such an absurd, meaningless way, all goes towards making the reader appreciate why Damon “sat in that church hating on the world.” (p111)

Damon identifies, given his colouring “dark-skinned, green-eyed” (p268) as ‘Melungeon’, “which Mr Dick said is some other language for mixed-up piece of shit” (p267). The story explains that this group got their name, or thus self-identified, to avoid being identified as

the n-word if they were even the smallest tad of not-white. Meaning they couldn’t vote, have their own farm, etc. So these mix-ups that everybody called Melungeon went to the courthouse and said okay, that’s what I am. Write it down. (Proper noun, capital M.) The courthouse people probably studied on it but couldn’t find a thing in their books to say a Melungeon couldn’t do this or that, so. Nice trick.

p268

By the time Damon manages to seize an opportunity for a better chance in life, he is already almost twelve, and already perpetually set to suspicious, non-trusting, always expecting life is about to cuff him yet again.

“I was inked with the shit-prints of life: thrashings, lies told, days of getting peaced out on weed, months of going hungry.

p221

However, his seventh and eight grade years are a time when he finally gets a break and comes into his own, and begins to feel good about himself. He is not abused, he is given some opportunities, he is looked after by kindly people, and he is even identified as Gifted and Talented. He has friends, he enjoys success at football and all the adulation that comes with that in Lee County, and life seems to have turned full circle for our protagonist.  

But then of course, things don’t stay rosy for Damon; a few poor judgement calls send him spiralling down, particularly into the scenario of drug abuse. This is an extremely common problem in a poverty-stricken community with limited prospects and future. In fact, so commonplace and widespread is drug abuse that Damon claims he does not know a kid who is not using. June Peggot, a nurse, has seen it all. She struggles to help her patients, who only want her to write prescriptions for more drugs, which she refuses to do.

Mom [June Peggot] says half these people don’t know they’re addicted. They took what some doctor told them to, and now their fiending and don’t really know what it is. All they know is, Mom cut off their drugs and now they feel like they’re dying.

p362

Damon is introduced to the whole scene when he becomes hooked onto drugs by his own doctor after a sports injury, and he later even deals in prescription painkillers to other drug addicts, particularly when he has no other source of income. It is not just substance abuse; it is a way of life, and increasingly for those addicted, the whole of life.   

However, from his youth, Damon had been a gifted artist, and for awhile, it looks hopeful he can actually make a living and support himself, as a high school drop out and be incentivised to clean living and taking control of his future once more. However, the drugs and his own pride and assumed responsibilities drag him back into the morass again and again, despite the fact there are now good people around him who love him and want to throw him a lifeline. In a community like Lee County, where things are so precarious and volatile, it takes only a spark to set off tragedy, and Kingsolver builds to the climax of her story with consummate skill. Throughout the tale, the writing is superbly engaging, the way characters speak often very humorous and graphic:

They passed out the brains, he thought they said trains and he missed his. (p92)

I was so far behind it looked like a race with my own ass. (p221).

Damon’s personality and outlook can be seen to be shaped both by his life experiences as well as the language in which he expresses himself.  

At almost 550 pages, this is not a short read, but it is so good I wish it could have gone on another 550 pages more. One of Kingsolver’s best works – and that’s saying a lot, given how brilliant some of her other novels have already been. This however is a triumph of masterly storytelling – it hooks you from the first line and continues gripping every sentence, every page, right to the last full stop. I need not have worried about having expectations when I began the read – this novel would have surpassed even my wildest.