Barbara Kingsolver News

 In prison, I undertook reading as much as possible to improve my writing rather than for entertainment. One reading list I cribbed from Entertainment Weekly's 100 best Novels of All Time. On that list was Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. She blew me away. Which led me to her debut, The Bean Trees. I find her an interesting writer, she makes me wish I had more time for reading right now. 

She has a new novel out: How Dickens came to Barbara Kingsolver’s rescue:

She’d always loved the humour in Dickens – at 12 she strong-armed her siblings into putting on a puppet show of A Christmas Carol – but this was a whole new level of discovery. She worked through what she thought of as a translation, or a masterclass: at one stage she had a spreadsheet with notes for all 66 of the David Copperfield chapters and her own notes for what would happen in each of her corresponding chapters.

Despite her admiration for the author who she calls her “genius friend”, she doesn’t want to talk too much about Dickens or his novel. You don’t have to have read David Copperfield in order to read Demon Copperhead, she insists. And in some ways she’s departed from her model, particularly in the character of her hero.

“David is kind of wide-eyed, trying to see the best in people. Demon is much more savvy and he’s already had such a rough life. He quickly becomes very cynical about what adults have to offer, because in his world they never come through. For most of the story, there’s not a single adult he can count on.”

In her 34-year career, Kingsolver has told many big stories with strong social and political themes. She’s won numerous awards for her 18 books, notably The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, and prizes for her body of work include the National Humanities Medal, the highest US honour for service through the arts. But Demon Copperhead is perhaps her most ambitious novel yet, with a theme of nothing less than where and how her country has failed its children.

“This novel is full of hard truths about the United States of America and about Appalachia where we live, and what a low priority the country places on anything to do with kids,” she says. Demon is one of many such disadvantaged children: born in a trailer to a drug-addicted single mother, bullied by a stepfather, farmed out to disastrous foster homes. For a while it looks as if he’s found his redemption through playing football, but an injury sends him on the road to hell.

Hell is opioid addiction, and Kingsolver depicts it in all its horror. “Everything that happens to Demon has happened in real life to someone I know,” she says. “Someone has been lost to an overdose, or has completely imploded in a way that often destroys a whole family.” In her research she talked to recovering addicts – “I would sit and cry with them” – and found out how you take a pill into your veins. Some of the stories made her skin crawl.

The Guardian has an interview under Barbara Kingsolver: ‘Middlemarch is about everything, for every person, at every age’. Some interesting points:

The writer who changed my mind
Doris Lessing. I read her Children of Violence novels in my late teens, and suddenly had new eyes for racism, sexism, southern Africa and my own segregated town in Kentucky. Also, new eyes for what literary fiction can be and do in the world.

The book that made me want to be a writer
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row. I’d written privately since childhood, but never imagined writing for anyone else, because I didn’t know anything important. Then in my mid-20s I read a funny, beautiful novel about an odd little scramble of not-important people. I thought: “I could try to write a book like that,” and I did. It was The Bean Trees.

The book or author I came back to
Charles Dickens. I liked him well enough as a younger reader, but didn’t appreciate his genius. The craft is so solid, you don’t see the director backstage manipulating plot and point of view. Now, as a novelist, I’m back there with him asking after every scene, “How the heck did you pull that off?”

The book I reread
George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I reread it at least once per decade, because it’s about everything, for every person, at every age.

 That's how I started writing again, by reading and asking how they did it. Kingsolver goes after the topics I wish I had the chops to do properly. Want to see the dangers of religious fanaticism meeting Joseph Conrad, read The Poisonwood Bible.

YouTube I see has some interesting video, Barbara Kingsolver in conversation with Ann Patchett. I have not had time to watch this, I am writing this morning.

sch 10/23/22