I sometimes scold myself for never reading modern novels, so I went in the shallow end with this modern novel based on “David Copperfield”. I was immediately immersed in it – perhaps partly because it’s set in a world as alien to me as Victorian Suffolk and Canterbury: Lee County, Virginia (I had to look for it on a map). And, after reading so much Jean Rhys, it was exhilarating to read a writer who wrote with such a different narrative voice.

It’s a fascinating reworking of Dickens, with that same sense of a child’s sufferings lasting throughout his life. One big difference is where the source of the world’s iniquities is located. Dickens had the usual Victorian morals, although more generous than some. In later novels he also saw institutions as complicit in causing suffering, but morality is largely down to individuals keeping to the right path. Kingsolver has a more modern interpretation based on social and economic circumstances: the wrecked lives of her opioid-addicted characters are inextricably linked to the exploitation of land and labour by the powerful, and the cynical pushing of painkillers to people who have no choice but to work themselves to a standstill is the cause of their addictions. (This theme was hammered a bit; she resembles Dickens in having a few skippable sections.) Thankfully she ditches Dickens’s over-ripe sentimentality – thus Demon is alive to his mother’s shortcomings – but retains the sympathy and compassion:

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 tooth-brushed 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.