Recently I finished reading one long novel and two slender novellas. The long novel is a fine piece of work. The two novellas are perfect.
The long novel, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, ambitiously aspires to transplant Dickens’s David Copperfield to Southwest Virginia during a stretch of time roughly 20-30 years ago. Some of the transformation involves a simple adjustment of names: Peggotty becomes Peggott, Ham becomes Hammer, Agnes becomes Angus. Many elements of the plot find modern-day parallels. Our narrator Damon, who quickly acquires the nickname Demon, echoes his counterpart David by starting with his own birth. Then, following the Dickensian model, his mother dies early after marrying a cruel stepfather, and the boy has a series of adventures before he grows into a successful artist. Those who have read the earlier novel will undoubtedly get ahead of the plot and anticipate major events before they occur. But Kingsolver is an artist herself, and her set pieces—a drowning at a mountain stream during a nearly supernatural storm, an unsettling conversation full of double entendres that escape young Demon but register chillingly with the reader—depart sufficiently from Dickens to keep pure predictability at bay. I must confess, however, that for me the departures from Dickens went so far afield that I wondered why she needed to rely so much on the 19th Century masterpiece for her framework in the first place. David Copperfield never gets into teen sex and serious drugs in the way that his modern avatar does. Dickens works abundant social commentary about abuse of impoverished children into his novel, and in turn Kingsolver addresses opioid addiction. But having read Beth Macy’s Dopesick, which describes the ravenous hunger for a high that afflicts so many addicts, I think that Kingsolver makes Demon’s drug use too easy for him to shake. (To be fair, that is not the case with his beloved Dori.) In the end Kingsolver delivers an absorbing and ultimately satisfying read even though—for me—her narrative sags in the second half.
Maybe I’m not raving about Kingsolver sufficiently because I just finished Claire Keegan’s flawless fictional gems, “Foster” (95 pages of generously sized words) and “Small Things Like These” (115 pages of equally readable text). I’ve listed them in the order in which they appeared in print, but I read them in reverse order, and when I finished “Small Things Like These,” I felt the same astonishment, awe, and wonder that I experienced at the end of Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” another indelible, painfully beautiful novella. Keegan sets these stories in rural Ireland, her home country, and for my money she ranks right up there with James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien, and the other stars in the huge Irish constellation of brilliant storytellers. Witness her skill and economy in building a world with these opening lines from “Foster”:
Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from. It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh, where my father lost our red Shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew where the man who won the heifer sold her shortly afterwards.
In a mere 83 words we’re situated not only in time and space, but we have inferred a sinking understanding of what the father is like. Or take the third sentence in “Small Things Like These”: In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke, which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. There is no way to describe this language as other than poetry. Keegan takes ordinary words (hairy, strings, stout) to describe ordinary events (smoke emerging from chimneys, rivers rising with rainfall) and gets us to see those commonplace occurrences as if for the first time. Note that I’m not saying much about the plots of these stories. That’s deliberate. I’d rather urge people to read them and let each story speak to each reader with maximum surprise. As a bonus, “Small Things Like These” is a Christmas story. I was glad to read it when I did, during Advent, but I know that it would have knocked me over just as powerfully if I had read it on the Fourth of July.