by Barbara Kingsolver, 2022
Painful page-turner, about the opioid crisis as told through the life of a little boy, Damon (Demon), in rural, poor Virginia. He goes through hell, literally, with a single, drug-addicted mom who marries an abusive man. When she dies of an overdose on “Oxy,” his already terrible world falls apart, and he’s only 10 or 11. He becomes an orphan, a foster child, and then a run-away in a scary, ugly world. He runs away to a place he’s only heard of once because his mother never talked about his dead father except for once. His dad’s mother, Betsy Woodall, from Murder Valley, came to get him when he was just born but since he was a boy, she left him with his Mom. Demon runs away and finds her and she takes him in because he looks just like her dead son. She finds him a home with Coach and Angus. He becomes a football star in high school, but his knee is damaged by an evil opponent. His knee is never treated, there are no good doctors in that backwoods town. Instead, he’s given painkillers. He becomes addicted. He ends up with a drug-addicted girlfriend and their life is just one fix after another. She shoots the drugs, he does everything but IV drug use because he’s afraid of needles. Their day-to-day life is shit, literally. Once the drugs wear off, they start to shake and shit. They have to get another dose. They live in filth and squalor. They never take the trash out, do dishes, nothing. He spends the next three years going down and down and down with most of the people he knows. Some have hearts of gold like him. Some are evil, cruel, darker than dark. There are people who stay clean and believe in him – Mr. and Mrs. Peggot, Aunt June, the nurse who understands what is going on in her home town and who is to blame (Purdue Pharma and it’s salesmen), Miss Annie (art teacher) and her black husband, Mr. Armstrong (also a teacher), Tommy, his good-hearted foster brother who gives him the shirt off his back and stays his friend the rest of his life, and “Angus,” Coach’s precocious daughter who becomes his best friend and savior, and in the end, true love.
Loved the characters, hated the setting, loved the ending.
This book won the Pulitzer Price for Fiction along with the book, Trust. It was a tie. This book was very long, 879 pages in large print version. It was full of bad words and filthiness, but I guess that makes it authentic. I really feel what it is like to be in the rural South with its poverty, addictions, abuse. There are hints of its beauty, the beauty of the countryside, throughout: birdsong, trees, flowers, streams, meadows.
Here are some quotes:
“The world is not at all short on this type of thing, it turns out. All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.”
“A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was the labor and materials we were given to work with. An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe. We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.”
“The preacher and his sermon, the sin and the flesh, all that I won’t go into. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about my little brother being in that casket with her. That part hadn’t dawned on me until I’d gone up to view her with Mrs. Peggot. She patted Mom on her dead hand and said, “Poor little Mama, you tried your best,” and that’s where it hit me: my brother was in that casket. I was robbed. What a goddamn waste.”
“What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.
“The doctor that prescribed it to Louise Lamie, customer service manager at Walmart, told her this pill was safer than safe. Louise had his word on that. It would keep her on her feet for her whole evening shift, varicose veins and all, and if that wasn’t one of God’s miracles then you tell me what is. And if a coworker on Aisle 19 needs some of the same, whether she borrows them legit or maybe on the sly from out of your purse in the break room, what is a miracle that gets spread around, if not more miracle?
“The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person’s reckless mistake. Only after it’s a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice.
“Mom was the unknown soldier…”
Page 204 (large print) talking to Emmy:
“My mom dying is not even the worst part. If you really want to know.”
“She sat facing me, waiting. She smelled like fruit shampoo. I wanted to say something mean, or just the truth. I wanted to tell her about my baby brother that was technically younger than the murder-family baby, and dead…”
Page 216-217, after Aunt June gave him markers for Christmas:
“But Aunt June got me something amazing: a set of colored markers for making comics, fine-tip on one end and thick on the other, in more colors than you’d think there would be. Eight entire flesh tones. Also a real book for making comic strips, with the panel dividers printed in. I couldn’t believe my eyes. After Mom died I’d not wanted to draw any more at all, but now I couldn’t wait to run off someplace and get started. I would make one of Aunt June as Wonder Nurse, putting a new heart back inside a boy that had his own torn out.”
“…It had only been thirty-nine days since Mom and my brother died, and that felt like longer than the years I’d been alive.”
He asks the Peggots if they will adopt him and Mrs. Peggot has to tell him no and it crushes him. “Thinking the Peggots were not like everybody else, but special, as regards the Jesus thing of loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself. For fuck’s sake, hadn’t I learned that lesson? Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.”
The last chapter takes place after he’s been in rehab in Knoxville and living in a half-way house, having stayed clean for over a year. He returns to his hometown to show Annie and Lewis his ideas for a comic book – he has become somewhat famous for his on-line comic strip about his rural South culture and time. Annie wants to help him with contracts and whatnot. But she and Lewis have their baby on the day Demon arrives and he has to find other things to do. He finally drives out to the house he and Angus (Agnes) lived in with her father, Coach. She is in college now but is cleaning out the house to sell it. He thinks she is in love with someone else, but she is really in love with him and has been since the day she met. They dance around it, and she proposes they do something Demon has wanted to do his whole life – go to the ocean. On two prior trips with others, Demon almost got there but never quite made it – they were horrible trips and horrible letdowns. With Angus, they are sailing east and it’s beautiful once they realize they are in love with each other. Last two paragraphs:
“We talked the whole way through the Shenandoah Valley. The end of the day grew long on the hills, then the dark pulled in close around us. Snowflakes looped and glared in the headlights like off-season lightning bugs. Ridiculous nut that I’d been to crack. I drove left-handed with my right arm resting on her seat back, running my thumb over the little hairs on the back of her neck. The trip itself, just the getting there, possibly the best part of my life so far.
“That’s where we are. Well past the Christiansburg exit. Past Richmond, and still pointed east. Headed for the one big thing I know is not going to swallow me alive.”
Wayne says the people behind the pharmaceutical companies that caused this crisis should get the death penalty. They destroyed so many lives and still are. They researched counties with the most people on disability for pain and sent salesmen there and pushed the pills on the doctors. They prescribed them willy-nilly and didn’t stop when they realized people were addicted. They set up “pain clinics” and the parking lots were full of addicts waiting to get their pills – scenes of heartache and pain and desolation and wasted lives. If people couldn’t afford the pills, they turned to heroin, which is far cheaper, and now fentanyl. It’s so tough to get off of opiates because the withdrawal symptoms are so horrible: chills, itching, diarrhea, pain, horrible feelings mentally and physically that only the drug can take away. The way to get off is to take Suboxon which alleviates the withdrawal symptoms without getting one high. Demon decides to go to rehab as June advises him and that is how he kicks his addiction.
She dedicates the book: “For the survivors”
Here’s Mr. Armstrong, the black teacher, telling Demon and his friends the true history of their county:
“Wouldn’t you think,” he asked us, “The miners wanted a different life for their kids? After all the stories you’ve heard? Don’t you think the mine companies knew that?”
“What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.”
When he’s a freshman in high school, he’s on top of the world, he’s already a star football player and worshiped every Friday night. It’s the year 2001. She writes:
“The hopeless wishes that won’t quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and love you, and stay. Or could say to your mirror, same reason.
“Some people never want like that, no reaching for the bottle, the needle, the dangerous pretty face, all the wrong stars. What words can I write her for those eyes to see and believe? For the lucky, it’s simple. Like the song says, this little light of mine. Don’t let Satan blow it out. Look farther down the pipe, see what’s coming. Ignore the damn tomcats. Quit the dope.
“Two thousand and one was the year I had everything and still went hungry…”
She writes about the way the South is the butt of everyone’s jokes:
“There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy.
“This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.”
His first girlfriend, Dori, is a little bitty thing as pretty as can be, taking care of her Dad, Vester, who is dying of cancer. Turns out she becomes an addict because she starts taking his painkillers and then shooting up. Their first date, she talks about it’s never as good as the first time and he thinks sex, but she gives him Fentanyl. This is after he is already addicted to painkillers because of his knee and his life is starting to go down the toilet. If he doesn’t have his pill, he vomits and shits himself.
“…Walking like an old man with a bum knee already, I refused to be another mess for Dori to clean up. So after that, she always had something to tide me over. This or that, Xanax, Klonopin, a dab from one of her Dad’s morphine patches if nothing else was on hand. But usually something was.
“I thought I knew it all in those days. I’d seen people at school, in the locker room, even at Mr. Peg’s funeral, with stains on their shirttails. Greenish grass stains, or pinkish brown like dirt. How could those people be so prideless, I thought, showing up in dirty shirts. I didn’t know that was the coating of a pill that keeps this safer-than-safe drug from dissolving in your stomach all at one time. Coppery pink on the 80 milligrams, green on the 40s. Melts in your mouth like an M&M. Hold it there a minute, then take it out and rub it on your shirt-tail, and you’re looking at a shiny white pearl of pure oxy. More opioid than any pill ever before invented. One buck gets you a whole bottle of these on Medicaid, to be crushed and snorted one by one, or dissolved and injected with sheep-vax syringes from Farm Supply, in the crook of an arm or the webbing of your toes. People find more ways to shut up their monsters than a Bible has verses.”
Here he is talking with Emmy, June’s daughter, a few years older, and Emmy is telling him why people are threatening to kill June – she won’t give them a prescription for Oxycontin:
“”Mom says half these people don’t know they’re addicted. They took what some doctor told them to, and now they’re fiending and don’t really know what it is. All they know is, Mom cut off their drugs and now they feel like they’re dying. So why won’t she help them?”
“All this was making me hanker to go take more pills. Sick as that is. I wondered if Emmy knew how deep I was in. But she was wrapped up in her own shit. She said in Knoxville, June could refer these patients someplace for help, but here their insurance only covered the pills.”
June is telling him how this whole mess started:
“I shouldn’t have asked what bastard. Kent. And his vampire associates, quote unquote. Coming here prospecting. She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines. They actually looked up which doctors had the most pain patients on disability, and sent out their drug reps for the full offensive…”
Here Demon is talking about the addict’s life:
“Stupid is all the word I’ve had to cover much of my time on God’s grass. But it’s not stupid that makes a bird fly, or a grasshopper rub its knees together and sing. It’s nature. A junkie catches his flight. That sugar on your brain cells sucks away any other purpose. You can think you’re in charge. Walk around thinking this for hours at a time, or a day, till the clock winds down and the human person you were gets yanked out through whatever hole the devil can find. Learn your lesson, get your feet up under you. You will be knocked down again.”
Here he describes the symptoms that keep him addicted:
“I was still in the good part of my day, before fine and dandy edges over to sad and irritable. Then come sweats, yawning, itching, goose bumps, shaking and puking. These phases I could read like a watch. I was optimistic on getting home before fucked o’clock.”
When he is a little boy and his Mom marries Stoner, an abusive man, the horrible cruel mean things he does to Demon are hard to read. Then, she describes what another evil man did to Mariah, his buddy Maggot’s (Matthew Peggot) mom, that caused her to cut up the man and get sent to prison. It’s awful – this man would tie up Mariah after she had Matthew, he’s just a tiny baby. He would tie her up tight on the front stoop where she could see the baby but not get to him. Then, the man would disappear for days while Mariah had to listen to her baby crying. Maggot is taken in by his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Peggot, and raised while Mariah is in prison. He becomes a meth-head and gay, but he turns it around in the end. When his Mom gets out of prison, Maggot gets clean, they live together and work at PetSmart together, and Maggot meets his boyfriend at PetSmart – he’s the manager of the reptile dept., and lives happily ever after.
Reading about the evil men and the damage they do really makes you hate the south, though. There were some other bad dudes in the book, too – the guy Fast Forward, star quarterback, the one Demon meets at his foster home on the Creaky Farm. He is older and has Pharm parties for the three younger foster brothers. Demon’s only 10 years old. Turns out, Fast Forward is one bad dude. He uses people. He is very good looking. Emmy falls for him. He gets her addicted and uses her to sell drugs. Emmy runs away with him and June never stops looking for her. When they find her, in a crack house, naked on a dirty mattress, strung out on dope, June gets her into rehab and hopefully, Emmy’s life has a happy ending.
This book is a novel: “This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.”
Now I’m reading Horse by Geraldine Brooks. Her statement on the title page is this: “This is a work of fiction inspired by actual events.” I think that is what Barbara Kingsolver should have written in her title page, because so much of this book is inspired by actual events, unfortunately. What a f’d up world!
In her Acknowledgements, she thanks Charles Dickens for David Copperfield, as he inspired her throughout. She also thanks Art Van Zee: “Beyond the scope of this novel, we can all thank Dr. Van Zee for his groundbreaking exposure of dangerous prescription opioids, ultimately bringing the crisis to public attention. I’m in awe of his dedication to his patients.”
And this statement in the Acknowledgements: “Steven Hopp, in addition to reading and talking me through every page, kept me fed at my desk, accompanied me on fact-finding adventures, and pulled me outside into the sun, time and again, to get me back from the dark places this story needed me to go.
“For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who’ve lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you.”
Like Wayne said, the heads of those pharmaceutical companies should have gotten the death penalty.