The Barnes and Noble exclusive version of Demon Copperhead starts with an essay by Barbara Kingsolver titled “An Ethereal Visit”. In it, she talks about the catalyst for her writing the novel – a visit from famed (and long dead) author Charles Dickens. She talks about the residual hurt she felt while in Dickens’s study, about the pain she felt Dickens “never fully exorcised” after a troubled childhood. From the start, Demon Copperhead was written to be a novel about the suffering inflicted onto those who have no control over their lives and how that pain lingers not just in individuals but the area that they reside in too. “‘Look to the child’”, Dickens tells Kingsolver. She listens, and for the next 500 or so pages, we experience a couple decades through the eyes of Demon, a wide-eyed, spunky boy hardened through the trials and tribulations of the American foster care system.

“‘Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose”, Demon says in the first chapter of the book. From the opening pages of the novel, Demon Copperhead has an admittance of defeat. Through the course of the winding plot, nobody escapes the fate given to them from being born into a poor family in Appalachia. This is an area cursed with the blood of the young, where children are forced into a broken foster care system and escape their pain through the very drugs that thrust them away from their parents in the first place. This overwhelmingly depressing portrait that Demon Copperhead paints is what the novel is most often criticized for – The Boston Globe’s Lorraine Berry argues that “[Kingsolver’s] characters wallow in dark hollows with little light, condemned to forever repeat the horrific mistakes of previous generations. She makes the people of Appalachia into objects of pity, but in doing so, also intimates that falling into drug abuse, rejecting education, and ‘clinging’ to their ways are moral choices.”

But to view the novel as simple poverty porn is to ignore the beating, resilient heart at the center of it – right after his statement, Demon continues: “You want to think it’s not over till the last page”. Despite the circumstances of his birth, he continues to hold onto hope that things will get better – in this way, Demon Copperhead is a remarkably optimistic story about hope as a necessity for survival. Throughout the seven circles of hell Demon goes around, one throwaway phrase from his neighbor Mr. Peggot acts as a lens with which we can view the events of the novel through  – “a man can get used to about anything, except hanging by the neck”. The misery is not the point, the strength Demon displays to keep moving on despite it all is. 

Of course, this isn’t to say Demon Copperhead is all sunshine and rainbows – it is a story about the overwhelmingly negative effects of big pharma, specifically the sins of the Sackler family, a story about the people we ignore to keep our delusions of Americana alive. To say that the overarching plot of the novel practically just functions as a vehicle to take Demon from one unfortunate event to another wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, though this would be a little like saying Frankenstein is a slasher and the plot of the novel is a vehicle to get from one kill to another. This is perhaps why critic Jessa Crispin of The Telegraph argues “Beset by earnestness, Demon Copperhead breaks the most important rule of working in the Dickensian mode: you must show the reader a good time … Demon Copperhead is only sad and glum, with every bad thing that happened in the original cranked up a bit”. 

To say this, however, is to overlook Demon Copperhead’s greatest scenes, the rare, sparse sparks of joy that Demon experiences, where all the brokenness within him and the systems around him disappear into the background and he can live in the moment – scenes like Demon and his role model Fast Forward talking and taking drugs under the moonlight, Demon learning to further his innate artistic abilities under the tutelage of his hippie art teacher, Demon working up the courage to ask out his charmingly debilitating crush. These are the memories that hurt him the most to reminisce about but are also the ones that keep him moving forward when he’s at his absolute worst. And that’s to say nothing of American football, the source of Demon’s most vibrant memories and his most vivid pain. 

Kingsolver has never believed in the American project – her first book, The Bean Trees, is about, among many other things, Native American parental rights and the failure of the U.S. to protect them. There’s a clear through line between The Bean Trees to her controversial 9/11 essays to Demon Copperhead, which essentially acts as her thesis statement on the state of America. Never is this more clear than in her depiction of football, simultaneously an incisive critique of the permanent damage the sport causes and the pure euphoria it creates in its players that have nothing else to live for. Our dreams are ultimately what suffocate us but are also what keep us breathing and Demon Copperhead is Kingsolver grappling with this contradiction, this dilemma at the roots of our country – how do we reconcile the inherent savage ruthlessness of the American Dream with our innate human nature to be caring and empathetic? 

Demon Copperhead isn’t perfect (no piece of literature has been since Hamlet), but its potent mix of misery and magic positions it as a contender for the 21st century Great American Novel. It is no more a piece of misery lit than other novels given the title of GAN (think The Catcher in the Rye or The Grapes of Wrath), perhaps because to be a classic is to confront the dark parts of human nature, and to focus purely on the misfortune of Demon is to miss the forest for the trees. Through what Goodreads reviewer Emily May derogatorily calls “every single hillbilly tragedy trope [combined] into one life story”, it tells a beautiful, messy story of those cut on the shards of a shattered American Dream, the indomitable human spirit in the face of all the cards being stacked against you, and hope as a necessity for survival in a broken world.