Reading - Demon Copperhead and If I Survive You

Demon Copperhead won a Pulitzer Prize and has had lots of publicity so I won't add much to what's out there, only to note some similarities to If I Survive You.

First I read Demon Copperhead for my bookclub.  A deep dive into being poor in Appalachia.  The hero in this David Copperfield inspired novel struggles to survive in a world shaped by addiction.  Author Barbara Kingsolver makes it clear that the addiction is the fault of the pharmaceutical companies whose owners and operators profit off of getting as many people addicted to opioids as possible.  Anyone who comes in contact with the health field and has some insurance of agency to subsidize their habit - foster kids, vets, the elderly, those employed with health insurance in any level job is fair game.  But Damon (Demon) has David’s (Copperfield) pluck and resilience as he bobs up and down in rural western Virginia, mostly.  (Thought I'd blogged about this one already, but I only mentioned it in passing.)

[As I move to If I Survive You, I'd say the main characters share struggling to make ends meet, being part of groups that are discriminated against (in Copperhead it's being from rural Appalachia) though Demon knows well who his cultural people are, just not his birth family.  Both are trying to overcome their own self doubts, though Demon seems more successful.  In some ways not having family may have given him an advantage over Trelawny who is in a constant fight with his father and brother.]

[I started this yesterday, but I'm adding a few notes today (Oct 3) but I'll leave what I wrote yesterday in the present tense.]

Now I’m on my second plane today and I’ve finished If I Survive You.  This book, by Jonathan Escoffery, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  It was among five and this one was at Loussac Library and available just before we left.  

It started out being about a youth, Trelawny, trying to figure out who he was.  Not personally, though, of course, that’s always there, but who did he belong to/with.  His parents and brother were born in Jamaica, but he was born in Miami and people keep reminding him that he speaks white which alienates him from the family and pretty much everyone else.  The Hispanics take him in at school, thinking he’s one of them and they pity him because his parents don’t speak Spanish. When they find out he’s Jamaican, they drop him.  “Am I black?” is a question he gets varying answers to until he gets to a midwestern college where everyone assumes, yes, he is.  

But then the book veers into many other directions.  The father/son and sibling relationships are painful to him and the reader.  It’s not clear to me to whom the “YOU” in the title refers - his father?  His brother?  The family?  Himself?  The world?  

The book took me around south Florida and introduced me to a lot of folks struggling with different ways to keep a roof overhead - musicians, an arborist, a boat captain for rent, school teachers, a nursing home flunky, and in the end a very wealthy couple with their own devils to overcome.  

It feels like this is more a collection of stories than a novel; the same characters run through most of the stories.  The one that haunts me most is “Splashdown.”  In it we see Trelawny's cousin finally meeting the father who he's never met.  But the nursing home chapter ("Independent Living") is a mini expose of that industry.  and the final chapter ("If I Survive You") is equally gripping and kinkier.  They all explore how the need for money causes people to do things they probably wouldn't and definitely shouldn't.  The last one adds a more direct example of privilege folks using a poor man for their own (apparent) gratification and that cause him conflicts between his moral standards, personal dignity, and money.  It essentially asks, how much money will it take to get you to do X?  When the money is small change to the offering party but significant to Trelawny.  

I don’t regret reading this book, but at the end I am haunted by the characters and their struggles. 

This is the United States we live in today, where there are a few people who have managed to vacuum obscene amounts of wealth out of everyone else.  Then there are others who would appear to live quite comfortably.  But over the last three or four decades, the rules of engagement have changed enough that more and more people are sliding out of the comfortable faction into the world of economic (not to mention psychic) struggle the characters in this book deal with daily.  

    

Thinking about this book as I reread what I've written - first on the plane when I finished the book and now as I add and edit - I know this is a book that I won't forget.  The scenes are so real that I almost feel like I was there.