God dammit, Barbara Kingsolver. A 546 page tomb inside which I cherished reading all the words, one after the next, and four days was too swift an experience. Probably going to read again on summer “break.” Do single Mamas get those? Where was I? The god and the dammit aspects.

Sure, a Pulitzer prize winning novel that evokes a David Copperfield era as in poverty stricken 1800s England—that is, a familiar environment called America's contemporary Appalachia, if truth be told. And Kingsolver strives to go there. Why not? Life is short. She writes in her end-of-the-book Acknowledgments (evidence I'm reading all the words through and through) that she is “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” (547).

Where Kingsolver goes godly is the canon work that this novel Demon Copperhead will remain. When we listen to the qualifying debate, just what is the great American novel, familiar names often appear: John Updike, Saul Bellows, Bernard Malamud, Herman Melville and so on. The white male privilege benchmarks often imply these authors are destined to write the great American novel.

Yet Kingsolver's ambitious literature once again redefines who gets to write fiction masterpieces set in American culture. Some novels simply have arrived to bookshelves through radical serendipity. Zora Neale Hurston's literary power was discovered on sheer reading prowess—a handful of literary women reclaimed her. I'm not getting feisty about the canon simply in awe that a white woman published in 2022 now qualifies as having written a great American novel, debate over.

What she accomplishes is that deft, painful description on destructive and protective family behaviors in reaction to poverty. The family saga Kingsolver historicizes through lively, soulful, and shattering fiction narrative details, a literary reckoning. This is America. Now. In other words, the great American novel. Opioid addiction is rampant, especially for high school youth. The football coach lionizes his role and later turns alcoholic.

As the industrial revolution began capitalism's demolishing poverty, so the continuing economic barbed wire fencing (deciding the haves and the have-nots) has brought addiction through legalized means, a recent capitalism chapter but all too familiar ongoing history of profit over, despite, and through ordinary people.

Growing up white, male, and in poverty is given empathy—as in the propensity for horrific violence, firing an assault weapon inside schools, the white male youth so frequently the shooter, has roots in Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead novel.

Several characters mitigate racism through restorative relationships. And these are a beginning few details that I share. Remember, we got 546 pages and I cannot recall one page where I did not flip intuitively to the very next one, so connecting me to vibrant, disturbing, struggling life—an immersive reading treasure—even the tear drop paragraphs and pages and chapters, because we got reality in here and that simply means pain and sorrow and the word that is canonical—hope.

What I also commend is Kingsolver going intertextual, method to establish this novel's alignment with other acclaimed novelists and by doing so she places herself on that credibility list, forging her own path. Her lead character Demon speaks in teenagerse to spotlight canon writers. J.D. Salinger, for one. Demon admits as much:

“I had to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books. Some of them though, I finished without meaning to. That Holden guy held my interest. Hating school, going to the city to chase whores and watch rich people's nonsense, and then you come to find out, all he wants in his heart is to stand at the edge of a field catching little boys before they go over the cliff like he did. I could see that. I mean, see it, I drew it, with those white cliffs on the Kentucky border...I've not ever seen rye growing, so I made him the catcher in the tobacco. Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from around here.” (374)

Coach Kingsolver motivates and cajoles and practices through her prose those repetitive, difficult laps around the heart wrenching track.

Why do we humans continue running in regressive loops on a basic life principle like treating children well? The prose in this novel does not flinch or look away or dismiss the wretched after the difficult before the impossible—living a well-balanced childhood inside dire poverty. Seems so apt that given Coach K's largesse in compassion, she finds solace in a British writer a hundred years ago, for the child abuse patterns continue. Kingsolver writes of Dickens' novel David Copperfield, “in adapting his 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” (547). Coaches are as strong as their assistants and Kingsolver found a capable one in Dickens.

On America's opioid crisis she tethers literature to addiction's interiority—lyrical and redemptive, in a few sparse chances, life inside imminent dying a fatal pill dosage. Why a teenager like Demon might approach overdosing crystalizes clear given Kingsolver giving him his point of view:

“If you've not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help. People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don't: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless...This tether that's meant to attach you to something all your life, be it home or parents or safety, has been flailing around unfastened all this time, tearing at your brain's roots, whipping around so hard it might take out an eye. All at once, that tether goes still on the floor, and you're at rest...It becomes your job, staving off the dopesickness for another day. Then it becomes your God.” (408)

The novel's scope and sweep encompass characters circuitously surviving, barely on life's surface, and the writing mires their difficulty in how America's social and economic history brought them to such a brink. Individual lives taken through systemic capitalism. In her way, Kingsolver writes possessed by her own demons—the inspiring and literary kind. She places only one dedication in the novel's opening pages: “for the survivors.”

Perhaps you can sense that I found the novel necessary reading, vital to being awake in America. And I so wish I could recommend that every high school English and college teacher assign the book. But god dammit, Kingsolver, I cannot. And so we return to the god and the dammit. Flummoxed, you are, dear reader, asking me why, Karolina? Every walk of diversity in characters is represented in Demon Copperhead—and I mean every. We have one gay youth who remains a best friend to the main character Demon and who's gifted a healthy relationship with his boyfriend at the novel's wrap (apology for spoiler alert). Even so, his name is Maggot—shy on the heroic that name.

And we have Miss Betsy who abhors men to the point where none are allowed in her house or even on the front porch; local villagers mock her for her misandry. Stereotype, I thought, but perhaps here arrives one gay woman in the literature? She dresses masculine and stylish, which can be code for butch lesbian. Ultimately, her philanthropic strengths are legendary especially as concerns Demon's welfare.

She appears around page 300 and more than a few strong women are represented this far into the novel—yet not one lesbian; still, I hoped and counted on the total invisibility not a go. Surely into the pages 400s and 500s we hear of her Miss Betsy's romantic friendships—this woman or that woman, a few that lasted—and instead the silence begins. Deafening all those crickets on the missed potential for Miss Betsy's character—empowered as she remains in other attributes especially advocating for education as paramount.

I'm a relentless optimist and I trusted Kingsolver to go impresario and create one complex lesbian character, bringing her into the fold of diversity. Perhaps coach's daughter, Angus, who wears Doc Martens and various hats, and who Demon mistakes for a boy when he first meets her. Even as a stereotype that lesbians are known for processing—the pre-talk, during-talk, and post-talk before the actual conversation—more than a few diamond truths are apt in lesbian culture. We are known for processing. And Angus is shown as a gifted talker and her emotional processing through myriad conversations portrays strength for honesty. Surely her, I thought while reading. Alas, she pairs with a boy in the end and the predictable continues.

In this great American novel, all those 546 pages long, we have the chance to not meet one lesbian. Not one. God dammit. Celebrate all this novel's writing strengths, I do. For the sake of reading activism, devoting all those commitment hours to reading every Demon Copperhead word and image and lyrical passage was a sheer joy.

And when accomplished I wonder what the process cost me to not see myself represented—at all? Perhaps my advocacy is extreme—to avoid an entire book for such a negligible absence, and am I though? Suppose that at 59 years of age and having read my fair share of novels—meaning the hundreds with a similar absence—I'm feeling compelled to draw a line. How else is change forwarded?

Brilliant kudos to Kingsolver for, in her own words, she wrote Demon Copperhead “for the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who've lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you” (548). Given the many privileges experienced in my life so far, I have escaped these dire childhood events. Invisibility dynamics are multifaceted, too.

In that way not at all comparable to say, yet I will add that after reading a great American novel I do feel invisible—entirely so, for I am lesbian and I never once saw myself in any of the characters; gay women simply do not exist.