The book was resented by Wendy H. on Friday 11 October 2024.
Attendees: Jennifer J, Jennifer S, Betsy M, Leslie Lie, Barbara Jacobs, Denise Pa, Mariannick , Beth, Peggy , Rosie , Sealia and her friend Sara, Wendyn and her sister-in-law Rebecca.
We began with introductions since the October meeting brought new arrivals to the book club (Jennifer Steil, Betsy Merceron, and Beth Hagman) and visiting guests Sara and Rebecca. Jennifer J., our American Women’s Group President welcomed everyone and said how pleased she was with the turnout and especially glad to have the memoirist and novelist, Jennifer Steil, as a member of our group. Jennifer Steil has kindly donated her three books to the MEL library, so members can enjoy getting to know these acclaimed works.
Wendy Harding presented the novel, beginning her introduction by saying a few words about the importance of place in the all Kingsolver’s writings. Place names may be invented, but she draws on her experience of real places. So she offered a very brief place-based biography.
Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955, in Annapolis, Maryland, but barely remembers it because her family moved to rural east-central Kentucky when she was two. She says, “I’m lucky to have grown up in the midst of pastures and woodlands.” Her father was a doctor who volunteered for stints in other countries. One particularly important assignment was in the Republic of Congo. The family's time in Africa inspired her novel The Poisonwood Bible. Kingsolver got a scholarship to study piano at university but switched to biology. She got her M.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She met her first husband at the University of Arizona where she studied and where they both worked. The family lived in Tucson Arizona and several of her novels are set in the Southwest. After a divorce, Kingsolver accepted a fellowship at a college in southwest Virginia in order to be near family in Kentucky. There she met and married Steven Hopp, a biology professor, who has a family farm in Washington County, Virginia. In 2004 the family moved to the farm. Together they authored a book (Animal Vegetable Miracle) about their experiences of producing their own food and eating according to the rhythms of the seasons.
Kingsolver’s Appalachian home inspired her book Flight Patterns, about the effects of global warming and also, more to the point, Demon Copperhead.
The opioid epidemic has hit rural communities particularly hard. Rather than showing the effects through statistics or documentaries, which tend to distance us from those suffering from opioid addiction, Kingsolver’s novel has a first person narrator describe his own struggle with addiction and with the destruction that opioids wreak in rural communities. The writer takes her cue from Dickens who affronts the problems of Victorian society in his novels. Katharine C. reminded us that the idea for the novel came when Kingsolver was visiting Bleak House. She heard the voice of Dickens saying: “let the child tell the story.” Since David Copperfield is the inspiration, Wendy found it interesting while reading to discover the things that she borrowed from that work and what she transformed. The ancestors of the Dickensian characters are there (with slight alterations to names) and the plot development is very similar, but the new setting demands creative changes. One similarity readers found was the way both Dickens and Kingsolver point to the social causes of their characters’ troubles. Both novels refer to the exploitation of subaltern people: children and women for Dickens and Appalachian people for Kingsolver.
Wendy raised the question of whether the debt to Dickens detracts from or adds to the achievement of the novel. Those who hadn’t read Dickens assured everyone that the novel stands on its own. Those who had said that reading the contemporary novel awakens memories of Dickens and sparks a dual pleasure of both familiarity and newness. The details that are kept (like Tommy Traddle’s skeletons) work well and the additions (like the hapless social workers caught in a dysfunctional system) permit a social critique of the 21st century America. Addiction stories are all the same, according to Katharine C., but the Book Group’s readers agreed that the narrative voice is what makes the book.
Wendy H. read some of the opening sentences of David Copperfield. We can hear that Davy’s voice is similar to all other Dickensian heroes. Demon’s voice makes his character live and breathe—it makes him unique. Rosie played us a short excerpt from the audio version (read by Charlie Thurston). Hearing the regional accent and intonation especially helped the British contingent, who had difficulty imagining the accent. Kingsolver chose not to deviate from standard spelling, a choice that African American writers like Toni Morrison make, so as not to inscribe the voice in a comic tradition that mocks non-standard accents. We all felt that the portrayal of Demon’s teenaged attitude was amusing and authentic. His voice reveals a second important literary debt—this time to an American writer, J.D. Salinger. There’s an acknowledgment of this heritage on p. 374 when Demon talks about one of the books he “finished without meaning to. That Holden guy held my interest.” (Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye.)
We talked about the way the novel deals with the opioid crisis. It doesn’t constitute a sociological or political analysis but still, the novel subtly points to the causes of the problem. There’s the salesman for Big Pharma, the doctor who makes a fortune writing prescriptions, and the community devastated by the prior exploitation by the coal industry.
We discussed the question of why Demon comes back to his childhood home at the end of the novel. One answer was that it’s there that he’s known. Elsewhere he feels invisible. Wendy H. pointed out that after three years in rehab, Demon is nervous about coming back. What really confirms his sense of belonging is his re-immersion in the natural surroundings that he has loved from childhood. In the article from the Observer that Katharine shared with us, Kingsolver says: “So much of the world is not made by people, and paying attention to that is important to me.” Although it’s not a book with a lot of nature descriptions, those that are there define the character. For example, p. 129 when Demon compares Knoxville, where Emmy lives, to home. “She’s scared about leaving Knoxville. …. senseless.” When Demon comes home at the end of the novel, he has a kind of rebirth in going back to Devil’s Bathtub. He says p. 530 that he “needed to find the place that would make me hate it here and not come back.” But it has the opposite effect. Maybe what follows on p. 531 is the longest description of the Appalachian environment in the book: It’s very sensual, with auditory and olfactory sensations as well as visual ones.
But there are also scenes of degradation: the dog’s room he lives in at the McCobbs’, Creaky’s farm, Coach’s house full of sports equipment, the house full of trash and broken appliances where he lives with Dori, the crack house where he finds Emmy, and the urban neighbourhood of the halfway house in Knoxville. Wendy H. proposed that this is not the usual image of America—certainly not the glamorous one that French people have—but it’s true to life. There followed a debate about whether the French still idealise the USA. Group members found that there had been a change in views of America with the rise of the MAGA movement. Sealia said that her French contacts now understand America to be “broken” because of the health insurance problem, the widening gap between rich and poor, the opioid crisis, the assault on the Capital and other factors.
Denise pointed out that this discussion of contemporary American society and politics provides an apt transition into the next book that we will read: Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, scheduled for November 15th.
