Practically from our first meeting, she’d been after me to write a recovery journal. I told her I don’t write, I draw. She said this would be for myself only. I could share it, but only if I chose to do so. The idea being to get clarity and process some of my traumas. On that particular ball of yarn I didn’t know where to start. She suggested pinpointing where my struggles had started with substance abuse, abandonment, and so forth . . . I’ve made any number of false starts with this mess. You think you know where your own troubles lies, only to stare down the page and realize, no. Not there. It started earlier. Like these wars going back to George Washington and whiskey. Or in my case, chapter 1. First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me. Here we are.
For a novel that has (more or less) exactly the same plot and (more or less) the same characters as David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead is remarkably unlike David Copperfield. This confused me a lot when I read the first half of Kingsolver’s novel back in January—confused and also alienated me, to the point that I not only put it aside unfinished but wrote plaintively to my book club asking if maybe we could choose something else for our next read. I’m glad now that other members said they were enjoying it and so we stayed the course: with our meeting to talk about it finally looming, I picked it up again yesterday and ended up reading right through to the end in a few hours. I was not delighted by it, but I became engrossed in it, and though overall I am still disappointed in it as a revision of Dickens’s novel, as its own novel Demon Copperhead is, I think, actually pretty good.
It is tempting but probably pointless to track through Demon Copperhead comparing its main ingredients to their counterparts in David Copperfield. On the other hand, some comparison is irresistible, if only to illustrate how Kingsolver both does and doesn’t do what Dickens does. “First, I got myself born,” her novel begins. Here, in contrast, is the famous opening of David Copperfield:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
Kingsolver jumps right into the action, and really, it never stops, for the next 500+ pages. Demon Copperhead is a rush of narrative—a copious, colorful, fast-moving torrent of words. Although it is clear by the end of the novel that it is, like the original, retrospective, it has none of the layers of David Copperfield, which is complicated and enriched by foreshadowing and dramatic irony. It is perhaps surprising, given his reputation for exaggeration and hyperbole, that, on my reading anyway, Dickens is by far the more subtle and nuanced author of the two. Kingsolver (or, properly, her first-person protagonist Damon Fields) just keeps going and going and going, a kind of tireless Energizer Bunny of grim revelations about the hardships of life for a child born in poverty in Appalachia and growing up through the worst of the opioid crisis. At a time when the idea that fiction should have a purpose is (in elite circles, anyway) often dismissed as incompatible with real art, Demon Copperhead is, unapologetically, a fully committed ‘social problem’ novel: it has more in common, in that respect, with Mary Barton, or even with Bleak House, then with David Copperfield, which is, as its opening line tells us, a story about moral development—an individual story, a Bildungsroman. Its action is always, more than anything else, about David’s character, and especially about his tender, loving heart.
As novel about Appalachia and the opioid crisis, Demon Copperhead is quite compelling, although it is also pretty heavy-handed. (I might not have thought this about the novel if I hadn’t recently watched the excellent series Dopesick, which covers a lot of similar sociological territory and hits some of the same beats, in terms of storytelling.) What I figured out, when I returned to the novel after my long hiatus, is that the David Copperfield framing is a red herring, perhaps based on a misunderstanding or a misapplication of the kind of novel Dickens wrote. This point really clicked for me when I reached Kingsolver’s Acknowledgments, at the end of Demon Copperhead:
I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting this novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.
It’s notable to me that the rest of her acknowledgments are to people who helped with expertise related to social problems (“foster care and child protective services . . . logistics and desperations of addiction and recovery, Appalachian history” etc.) – not to Dickens or David Copperfield. It isn’t that David Copperfield is not about child poverty and harsh social conditions; it’s that (I would say, anyway) these circumstances are incidental in David Copperfield to David’s perceptions of his experiences, and to Dickens’s own preference for addressing material conditions as external manifestations of moral and imaginative conditions. At best, Kingsolver is taking Dickens more literally than is usually appropriate; at worst, she is entirely overlooking his preoccupation with David’s inner life.
One of the costs of Kingsolver’s approach is prose that is also excessively literal, chock full of vivid, concrete details but leaving very little to—or providing very little stimulation for—our imaginations. Something I often discuss with my classes is the way Dickens’s writing itself creates in us, as we read it, the kind of mental activity he fears modern life is devaluing and suppressing: the flights of fancy in his language do for us, cultivate in us, what he fears we are losing. He writes in defiance of political economy, of utilitarianism, of facts—at least, of facts reduced to discrete and definitive units of measurement, the way they are in the famous opening of Hard Times:
‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’
Hard Times is Dickens’s most insistent and programmatic condemnation of sticking to “facts,” and also his most dogged but also (I think) rhetorically powerful defense of what he calls “fancy.” But he fights this fight in all of his novels in ways I have talked about here before, including in reference to David Copperfield, at least as much, if not more, through his style as through his explicit content.
I’m not saying Kingsolver’s prose is devoid of fancy. Most of its creative energy seems to me to rest in Damon’s voice, which is blunt and colloquial and observant, but not at all poetic. There is a lot of vivid imagery, although so much of it is in aid of things we’d rather not see that it can be hard to appreciate it as artistic. It’s the other qualities that, to my mind, define “Dickensian” writing that I really miss, though. For one thing, Kingsolver’s novel is entirely unleavened with humor. OK, our introduction to her version of Aunt Betsy and Mr. Dick (here, Damon’s grandmother Betsy Woodall and Brother Dick) is amusing, but oh, how I missed Janet and the donkeys! And though the basics of the plot about Uriah Heep’s malevolent machinations are the same, the exposure of U-Haul has none of the exuberant joy of Mr. Micawber’s increasingly vehement denunciations:
And last. I am now in a condition to show, by—HEEP’S—false books, and—HEEP’S—real memoranda, beginning with the partially destroyed pocket-book (which I was unable to comprehend, at the time of its accidental discovery by Mrs. Micawber, on our taking possession of our present abode, in the locker or bin devoted to the reception of the ashes calcined on our domestic hearth), that the weaknesses, the faults, the very virtues, the parental affections, and the sense of honour, of the unhappy Mr. W. have been for years acted on by, and warped to the base purposes of—HEEP. That Mr. W. has been for years deluded and plundered, in every conceivable manner, to the pecuniary aggrandisement of the avaricious, false, and grasping—HEEP.
Yes, he goes on like this for pages—and (as Joe Gargery would say), what larks!
What I missed most of all in Demon Copperhead was the melancholy tenderness that suffuses David Copperfield, and the way Dickens shades David’s highs and lows with his profound understanding of both the necessity and the heartbreak of losing our childhood innocence. The David that worships Steerforth and adores Dora is so loving and lovable: he is wrong, of course, in both cases, but Dickens is so good at making us feel to our core the cost of outgrowing mistakes like these, of becoming someone too savvy and knowing and suspicious to follow our hearts without question.
There’s also just nothing in Demon Copperhead that rises to the level of Dickens’s sheer virtuosity as a writer in David Copperfield. The scene in which Kingsolver’s Steerforth (Fast Forward) comes to his end is dramatic and suspenseful but it has neither the rich pathos nor the glorious prose of Dickens’s chapter “The Tempest”:
The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me. As the high watery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town. As the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out deep caves in the beach, as if its purpose were to undermine the earth. When some white-headed billows thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they reached the land, every fragment of the late whole seemed possessed by the full might of its wrath, rushing to be gathered to the composition of another monster. Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made, to change its shape and place, and beat another shape and place away; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings, rose and fell; the clouds fell fast and thick; I seemed to see a rending and upheaving of all nature.
The ending of the chapter is in a different register altogether from the extravagance of that description: quieter, sadder, and resonant with everything that David has known and been and loved and lost:
As I sat beside the bed, when hope was abandoned and all was done, a fisherman, who had known me when Emily and I were children, and ever since, whispered my name at the door.
‘Sir,’ said he, with tears starting to his weather-beaten face, which, with his trembling lips, was ashy pale, ‘will you come over yonder?’
The old remembrance that had been recalled to me, was in his look. I asked him, terror-stricken, leaning on the arm he held out to support me:
‘Has a body come ashore?’
He said, ‘Yes.’
‘Do I know it?’ I asked then.
He answered nothing.
But he led me to the shore. And on that part of it where she and I had looked for shells, two children—on that part of it where some lighter fragments of the old boat, blown down last night, had been scattered by the wind—among the ruins of the home he had wronged—I saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school.
Honestly, it seems kind of unfair to point out that Kingsolver doesn’t—perhaps can’t—write like that. There’s a reason Dickens was called “the Inimitable!” No doubt, too, there are some of you who prefer what she does to what Dickens does. (To each their own, of course, but also, you’re just wrong!) To invite comparison with the greats is to set yourself up for failure, and I definitely wouldn’t say Demon Copperhead is a failure. I doubt I’ll read it again, though, whereas I am wholeheartedly looking forward to rereading David Copperfield again this fall with my students.
Novel Readings 
I couldn’t get through it. I think probably The Bean Trees if more what Kingsolver does well, but writers are allowed to attempt and fail. All I know is that I still teach Bean Trees and wouldn’t touch anything that came after that. Wish I could teach Dickens!
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When I went back to it after my hiatus, I let myself do some strategic skimming for a while until I remembered what was up and where it was going, and even once I settled in I didn’t feel compelled to read SUPER carefully word for word – which maybe reflects badly on me, but it just wasn’t that rewarding lingering over the writing. Taking it at a faster pace helped me get through it. Parts of the ending are really very good, though. Still, I am not (never!) going to say to someone that they “should” keep trying. I haven’t reread The Bean Trees in years but I remember enjoying it.
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If you’re not lingering over the writing and aren’t engaged emotionally and intellectually, it’s a fair book, but not a great one. It’s very difficult to strike that note. I think Kingsolver does better when she has voices like Taylor’s and Lou Ann’s going. I couldn’t even get through Poisonwood Bible…
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I so agree with you – The Bean Trees is Barbara Kingsolver’s best book, and oddly enough, feels to me a lot more like “David Copperfield” than “Demon Copperhead”, which I found to be mostly depressing. I gave The Bean Trees to my 16 year old granddaughter to read, and she loved it more than anything she has read before or since.
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Thank you, that is heartening to hear! I still love teaching Bean Trees, but my privileged, private school students have trouble with the context, voices, and the theme I use to teach it, as a comingofage of Taylor’s political consciousness. Still, I persist because it’s important to have experiences, at least in books, outside of your own.
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Since reading The Bean Trees, this same granddaughter, now seventeen, has read and enjoyed (but not as much) both Pigs in Heaven (she found the politics of Tribal Law to be tedious) and Animal Dreams. What is disappointing to me is that over the past two or three years, she has read almost nothing else except for two or three books required for high school English – Lord of the Flies (ugh), The Great Gatsby, and The Awakening. (She didn’t like any of them.) I have given her other books (A Room With a View, since she loved the film, Pride and Prejudice, ditto, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and others), but she hardly gives them a chance. Yet she is a good reader, a smart and thoughtful young adult, but one who doesn’t read books. This is hard to accept for this bibliophile, English major grandmother. Books can’t compete with phones, at least not with the young. So sad.
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I hear you. I teach absolutely lovely young women, but they suffer from the almighty screen and SM inundation. Has not done them any favours. I hope SM companies in particular get their comeuppance. Here, in Canada, the Toronto school boards are suing SM companies for ruining their students’ ability to learn, simple as that. Books are the last thing they’ll turn to. What’s sad is not whether they can literary-analyze, but they do not have the unique, profound experience of that connection between two minds: author and reader, in silence and internally voiced. Very sad.
I teach a romance fiction course and even there, though they enjoy it and do the reading, they would rather do anything but read. Or take marine biology: my romance fiction course beats marine biology every time!
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Something very strange happened when I was commenting on your wonderful article about David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead. My first comment was in my name (Lee Pope) but my second two comments were in someone else’s user name (delicately54c9e91ef5), and I have no idea who that is or how this happened. Nor can I figure out a way to correct the error. It’s not terribly important I suppose, but baffling and confusing none-the-less, especially since my second comment was a follow-up to the first and they are under different names.
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Hmm, yes, most strange…maybe Rohan can throw some light? She can view more about her blog than I can as a commenter.
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All I can tell you is that behind the scenes that other ID shows with the same email address and IP address as the post that says “Lee Pope.” Perhaps, Lee, you have a WordPress account with another username? But that would be on your side, not mine, and not something to pursue through this comments thread.
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What books do you read in your romance fiction class?
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Oh, I vary from year to year and I’d love to do a survey course, but early 70s 80s romance is nope.
I start with teen romance Reynolds’s The Summer of Lost Letters (thanks to Wendy Superlibrarian), Lucy Parker’s Act Like It, Kate Clayborn’s Love At First, Felicia Grossman’s Wake Me Most Wickedly, Emma Barry’s Funny Guy, Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavours, and conclude with Jen Crusie’s Bet Me. I wish I could include some category romance, but they’re never available in paper and we try as much as we can to keep the students off screens.
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*is more* sheesh…
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I found Demon Copperhead to be an enthralling story. It is told in a less poetic and more straightforward manner than the earlier masterpiece ‘David Copperfield,’ because we live in less wordy times..and because Barbara Kingsolver has strong messages to impart… misrepresent the Appalachian people at your peril and don’t peddle dirty drugs to them for a quick buck or to keep athlete’s bringing in the trophies! These messages dominate the narrative as the reformed addict looks back on his misfortunes.
The book, ‘Demon Copperfield,’ follows Dickens’s autobiographical style in order to show that the exploitation of the weak for material gain or power has always been a societal problem, exacerbated by the challenges of the Industrial Age. Widows and orphans have always suffered unless protected by caring folks or family, or having careers or independent means.
Both Demon and David were filled with righteous indignation at the harshness of their youths and admitted this led to their poor judgment of character as they searched desperatelyfor role models in an imperfect world, battled the baddies to survive and ending up married women as lovely and defenseless and morally weak as their own mothers.
In both novels, the orphan boys had to grow up and see that faithfulness and constancy was more valuable than star appeal, and to realize that nobody else could provide a permanent safety net for them. They must grow up to do that themselves.
Only when Demon and David had outgrown their attitude of outraged victimhood and learned to love themselves, could they love and respect the one woman who knew them flaws and all.Admittedly David Copperfield views his imperfections with more patience, but his battles were of another era.
Married to their respective angels…Agnes and Angus, our heroes would move forward to a brighter future.Charles Dickens qualified his Agnes as a teacher, wise and patient, while Kingsolver’s Angus becomes a social worker. It is possible that they both married their competent aunts!
It was not unrealistic to envisage our heroes prospering as both men had creative talents and deserved to do well. Frankly the reader deserved a good ending too after harrowing times!
I am not surprised that people found Demon Copperhead a hard read, it threatened to be depressing, while Dickens’s story is more endearing.
I was enthralled by Charlie Thurston’s audio version to the extent I wished to adopt both him and Demon. His reading was masterful, quick paced but filled with light and shade like a Beethoven Sonata..it actually stole the day..I may never read again!
On a personal note…I find it hard to blame institutions and individuals as much as both novels do! They too have their challenges. To me the real moral is the responsibility of parenthood. Your children desperately need your love and care. If ever given the privilege to guide a struggling child, one should embrace it willingly.
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I have not read Demon Copperhead, but I had a response similar to yours about Kingsolver’s heavy-handedness when I tried to read The Poisonwood Bible many years ago. I had LOVED The Bean Trees but found Poisonwood unreadable.
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As I’ve said before on my own blog, I think Kingsolver has trouble with didacticism in her fiction, with Animal Dreams and The Bean Trees at the less didactic end of her spectrum and Prodigal Summer at the way-too-didactic end. I thought with Flight Behavior she was beginning to merge the two impulses well, and Demon Copperhead is another pretty good merging.
You put your finger on what bothered me about it, though–Demon doesn’t develop much as a character. It’s not that he’s learning and growing, but that the readers are supposed to.
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Thank you for reminding me to return to your post now that I’ve read the novel for myself! You cover a lot more ground in terms of what actually goes on in the novel, so a much better picture of both the story and its strengths emerges. I noticed too the comments designed to chasten the “coastal elites”; it was helpful to be reminded of the conflations Kingsolver does of her own (putative) region. I agree about the didacticism being out of balance.
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“(To each their own, of course, but also, you’re just wrong!) ” HA! I felt that with Kingsolver’s previous novel (I think it was called Unsheltered or something?) she’d crossed a line into her books being more a response to America’s various crises than works of literature in their own right. So didactic, prescriptive. And yet, I am glad they exist, I am glad that someone is responding to America’s various crises (because most people aren’t). But it’s a bit too overearnest for my liking.
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Very interesting and thoughtful review. I just finished Demon Copperhead and loved it on it own merits, since it’s been many years since I read David Copperfield and don’t remember it that well. But I absolutely loved David Copperfield also and this critique rings true to me. The social commentary in Kingsolver IS more didactic. Dickens IS more concerned with the boy and his moral growth, with the social commentary more in the background.
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Hi – I recently finished reading Demon Copperhead and I’m still trying to decide if Kingsolver’s message is too heavy-handed. I haven’t read David Copperfield, so I’m unable to make the comparison of characters and how they are developed. I was actually thinking that Demon’s character wasn’t fully developed, despite the long road he traveled Thanks for your review!
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I too, as one commenter said, started Demon Copperhead and then, when near the end, stepped away from it. I was too exhausted by sorrow and the anger and Demon’s plight. But I was also intrigued by the character, and somehow did not want to let him go. I did go back and will treasure this book. There are no ways to compare David and Demon, or Dickens and Kingsolver. There are no levels or foreshadowings to explore in the book. The author puts us on a fast moving train. A train for our times. The rich pathos is not on board. It wasn’t meant to be. But brilliant prose. Oh yes.
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It sounds like Kingsolver really won you over! But I can’t agree that “there are no ways to compare David and Demon, or Dickens and Kingsolver.” After all, you’re commenting on a post that makes exactly these comparisons! 🙂 In fact, it seems fair to say that Kingsolver’s entire project assumes the importance of these comparisons.
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How long did Kingsolver take to write Demon Copperhead?
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Hi Nora – I must read David Copperfield. As for Demon’s character, I was frustrated with his narration during the period of addiction. He’s all over the place between being a good person and using, and it was long. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the author did this deliberately, that we were in an addict’s head, and the length seems to me to show how hopeless and endless addiction can be. Make sense?
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Not using is not equal good person, nor the opposite. I think you venture toward the reality of the addiction period in the book, but it’s not just to demonstrate despair it’s to paint a real picture of addiction, where the person wants and tries to do better but is so controlled by the drug they continuously fall backward. There is beauty in the sorrow of what Kingsolver has written. There are moment of tenderness, hope, and the will to be a part the world. To overcome what Demon experienced is truly inspiring and a testament to the strength of a seemingly vulnerable individual.
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The early lumping of poor residents of Appalachia with “Deplorables” was lazy and frankly incorrect. Clinton was observing that neoNazis and similar were all in for Trump. That’s all.
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Yes, there was a lot of willful and tendentious misunderstanding of that perfectly accurate remark.
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Although I am only half way through Demon Copperhead, I must say I disagree on you point about the novel being devoid of humor. I found the protagonists voice to be clever, observant and full of the humor of a coming of age novel. I am loving it!
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I’m glad you are enjoying it! All we can ever do is explain our own experiences of what we read; I gave as much detail as I could in this post about what reading Demon Copperhead was like for me. With David Copperfield as a touchstone, most other novels are going to fall flat, for me at least.
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I am now on vacation listening to David Copperfield, my third time with this novel. It is no criticism of Demon Copperhead (which I read last month and loved) to say that it falls flat in comparison. David Copperfield is, at least to my mind, one of the five or ten greatest English language novels ever written, so pretty much NOTHING else measures up.
One thing I am noticing that was missing in Demon is Dickens’ masterful portrayal of David’s youthful innocence and naïveté. As good a person as he is, David can’t quite see what’s behind other characters’ actions and motivations, but Dickens makes sure that the reader can. This makes his maturation throughout the long course of the novel all the more meaningful. He achieves wisdom before our eyes.
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I agree very much with your point about maturation: the retrospective narration in Dickens’s novel gives us so many layers by which we can measure what David gains and loses as he achieves that wisdom, too.
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The blow by blow comparison of this book to David Copperfield feels forced and to do this so literally seems unnecessary. It sounds more like an academic exercise and blurs the point of Demon Copperhead. Obviously the debt to Dickens is great, but Kingsolver is using it as a device to explore the cultural realities of Lee County, oppressive economic forces, ruthlessness of big pharma and a decayed and inadequate social infrastructure. As such, it is not inconsistent with Dickens.
Didactic- sure, but that never really obscures Demon’s character as he navigates everything thrown at him by a f*cked up family life, a failing social security system, schools. I’m surprised at those observations that there is no poetry in his narrative. I think his language is creative and evocative. If you love very clever purple prose, go with Dickens, but this is a 21st century novel and the language has a different cadence. Go with it.
If you want to make a literary comparison, it seems far more obvious to me to focus on The Catcher in the Rye, mysteriously ignored in the review. Demon’s voice is Holden’s first and foremost. Holden was overwhelmed by the phoniness of everything he encountered, the false mores of his time and his desperate need to save and protect the innocent. Demon in his own way echoes this, as he is swept up in the oxy wave, and desperately seeks a way through it for himself while trying to protect others who cannot help themselves.
It’s not my favourite ever novel, and the didactism could definitely be dialled down, but Demon’s voice is clear and poetic, the issues are real, and it stands on its own as good work of fiction, regardless of the obvious parallels.
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Thank you for reading and commenting, Steve.
Of course you aren’t the only person to respond with more enthusiasm to Demon’s voice than I did – the novel has, overall, been warmly received, and this comments thread already has dissenters! But I laid out as clearly as I could the grounds on which I found it disappointing (though I also say pretty clearly that, like you, I think it’s a good novel), just as you have very reasonably laid out your own response to it.
I have to say that it seems bizarre to me that you object to my doing a “blow by blow” comparison with David Copperfield. Kingsolver took every character and plot twist straight from David Copperfield: if that doesn’t invite comparison, I don’t know what does! I also don’t find it at all “mysterious” that I didn’t write a post comparing Demon Copperhead to Catcher in the Rye. That would be a different post. Feel free to write it at your own blog! This was not an academic exercise but an examination of Kingsolver’s novel drawing on my own reading experience and my own areas of interest – although if it had been an academic exercise, I don’t see what’s wrong with that. There is an entire academic discipline focused on analyzing, understanding, contextualizing, and theorizing about literature, after all. We study things we take seriously: that’s what the academy is for.
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I enjoyed reading this.
I borrowed Demon Copperhead from the library and though I’ve read many English novels featuring dialect, I found Demon’s dialogue incomprehensible and I sent it back unread.
So it was interesting to read the reasons why I’m better off with Dickens!
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I cringed throughout the my time with this book but finished it as a favor to a senior’s book club friend. Yours is a pitch perfect analysis of Kingsolver’s undeveloped skills.
Kingsolver seems to write with a telegraph key rather than a typewriter. She has solved nothing.
I had paused a Lucia Berlin short stories to do this Copperhead task and regret losing the time to a hack.
Great intelligent blog. Thanks for being there.
Daniel
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I started to write my own review with these exact sentiments, but then came to the interwebs hoping I wasn’t alone. And there you were! And so glad I’m not! Thanks for the thorough review, Kindred Spirit!
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I so strongly resonated with this wonderful essay I wish I had written it myself! I am about a third of the way through my third (or is the fourth?) reading of David Copperfield, and loving it as much as I did on first reading. I read Demon Copperhead when it first came out, and found it to a real slog – too unpleasant and too sordid to enjoy, with characters that mostly failed to grab me at all. I remember thinking that the U-Haul character was a really weak attempt at Uriah Heep. I was doing the comparing thing with my husband (who hasn’t read either book) and decided to do a search to find out what others had said, and found this page. I also discovered that plenty of people loved Demon Copperhead but couldn’t even get through David Copperfield due to its length and (I assume) it Victorian ambiance. Go figure. Dickens was no highbrow – but he was a genius. Maybe it’s a generation thing. I’m 76, and remember reading, and enjoying, Great Expectations at the age of 14.
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