![]() ![]() Readers who welcome and relish protest fiction, whether Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, might enjoy Kingsolver’s novel. The time is now, though there are very few references to contemporary events. You’d think he was from around here.” For Copperhead, whose hair is the color of copper wire, “around here” means Appalachia, where Kingsolver lives on a farm with her husband. ![]() In the body of the novel, Kingsolver’s protagonist and narrator- a poor white kid, a drug addict, an orphan and a born again artist- explains that while Dickens was a “seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Jesus Christ did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. ![]() To write her most recent novel, (2022 549 pages $32.50 Harper Collins) her tenth in the past 35 years, Barbara Kingsolver turned for inspiration to Charles Dickens whom she calls her “genius friend.” In the acknowledgements, she writes, “I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society.” She adds, “Those problems are still with us.” Isn’t that obvious? Why hit us over the head with it? ![]()
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