Barbara Kingsolver, _Demon Copperhead_

 I WAS ABOUT a hundred pages in when I decided this was now my favorite Kingsolver novel, dislodging The Poisonwood Bible, which had reigned serenely for a good twenty-five years.

I could go on an on about the merits of this book, but I will confine myself to three.

1) it's an honest but compassionate description of a problem that has been devastating the USA for years, focused on a region that has been hit particularly hard. Refreshingly (and in contrast, I would say, to J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy), there is no victim-blaming, and we see the problem more from on the ground than from up above (as in Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain). As an example of how fiction can illuminate a social reality, it can stand alongside Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

2) Quite unlike The Jungle, though, Demon Copperhead is a literary tour de force. The strategy of constructing the novel on the scaffolding of Dickens's David Copperfield could have been strained and distracting, or simply a way of showing off, but it ends up being one of the most brilliant successes in intertextuality that I have ever read. My only quibble is that Mr. McCubb, while certainly as feckless and irresponsible as Mr. Micawber, lacks his model's warmth and humanity.

3) The voice of Demon is convincing throughout, which must have taken some doing, not only because Kingsolver has never been an adolescent boy, but also because Demon has to sound intelligent, observant, and articulate without ever sounding bookish. His vocabulary, allusions, and syntax have to be those of an irregularly-educated young American male who almost never picked up a book, yet also have to make the settings vivid, convey nuances of character, and reflect Demon's ever-evolving consciousness. An impossible task, it would seem, but Kingsolver does it. As a breathtakingly-written book in the voice of someone who has to sound un-bookish, it rivals and maybe surpasses Peter Carey's True Adventures of the Kelly Gang. 

And so many vivid episodes--Demon getting robbed in a convenience store restroom, the 4th of July party, the pain clinic.... This is a masterpiece.