Everybody's Appalachian Protest Novel

Review

Everybody's Appalachian Protest Novel

Demon Copperfield is a phony

“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies,” says Barbara Kingsolver

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As Oscar Wilde and T. S. Eliot both wrote, “Talent borrows, genius steals.” To write her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, her tenth in the past 35 years, Barbara Kingsolver didn’t exactly steal, but she turned for inspiration to Charles Dickens, whom she calls her “genius friend.” She turned specifically to his 1850 autobiographical fiction, David Copperfield, a Victorian rags-to-riches tale that exposed the plight of children who toiled in factories and women who labored in what's now called “the sex industry.” In doing so, she set herself up for a comparison in which she was bound to come out on the shitty end of the stick. Dickens’ novel features a notorious villain named Uriah Heep. For ages, high school readers have learned to despise this antagonist who epitomizes malice. In the acknowledgements to her new novel, Kingsolver writes, “I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on …

Column

Fugitives

‘Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me’

From Huck Finn to Pretty Boy Floyd, H. Rap Brown and Abbie Hoffman, their home is the road

‘Don’t look for us, Dog. We’ll find you first.’

By Jonah Raskin

The English word “fugitive,” which has been around for centuries, was adopted as a noun and as an adjective in the 14th century from the Latin adjective fugitiuus, which comes from the verb fugere, which means to flee. Notorious 14th century criminals include Adam the Leper, Eustace Folville and Robert de Hellewell — who refused to fight with England against the Scottish, went into hiding and on the “lam.” H. L. Mencken included the phrase, “on the lam,” which was used by criminals, in his book about the American language. In the early 1970s I lived a kind of split-level life: I taught literature at a university, wrote essays and books, including an autobiography Out of the Whale, and kept an apartment in Manhattan; I also hung out with fugitives, including my wife, Eleanor, in New York and California. I helped Jennifer Dohrn, Bernardine’s younger sister, disguise herself and travel back and forth safely from underground to aboveground. I also aided and abetted Abbie Hoffman when he …

Everybody's Appalachian Protest Novel

Elm for Overwhelm

Fugitives