Demon Copperhead, the last ones and the redemption for a Dickens-like protagonist

Barbara Kingsolver has always been top of her class. Her books have been regularly on the New York Times bestseller list since the 1980s.
Con Demon CopperheadBarbara Kingsover was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Women’s Prize of Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
She is a committed and socially active writer, her novels touch on the themes of social injustice and with the latter she goes further, describing rural expropriation in the places in the United States that she knows best, the Appalachians, a mountain range that extends close to the Atlantic coast between the border with Canada and Alabama.

Demon

In Demon’s story, he reconstructs ignorance and poverty, the shortcomings of American public education, those of healthcare, the dangerous strategies of pharmaceutical companies but also revenge.

Dickens

The modern retelling of Kingsolver of Dickens’s most sentimental novel might therefore seem a little too courageous but reading the novel removes all doubts and also the desire to make comparisons at any cost.

History

Damon Fields was born in southwest Virginia in the late 1980s to a teenage mother who prepared and organized for the birth with gin, amphetamines and Vicodin. The boy’s attitude soon earned him the nickname “Demon”. His hair color spells out “Copperhead.” When his mother overdoses, Demon becomes a ward of the state. High school football offers him a brief period of glory and hope. Then a knee injury, painkillers prescribed by the doctor, opioid addiction. Added to this are youthful loves and an incessant chain of tragedies interrupted only sporadically by small victories. The story of Demon’s addiction is depressingly believable, the torture of endless, indefinite waiting: the circle of hell in which a patient languishes without the slightest idea of ​​when, how, or if he will be cured, or how much it will cost, or what variety of negligence he will receive. will happen and with what consequences.

But Demon is a fighter, acid, caustic and scratchy and will find his redemption. It is strange to note how, in the modern imagination, if Demon had really had to replicate David’s social rise – if Kingsolver had followed the spirit of the original – it would have had to become a reality TV star who wins the presidency.