Demon Copperhead. Such Kindness.

I used to read a lot. Through much of my adult life, I'd guess I averaged 2-3 books a week. Although I did plow through many tomes - lookin' at you, Joyce Carol Oates - I wasn't exactly curling up with War and Peace. But I read a lot. Literary fiction. Beach reads. History. Essays. Biography. Police procedurals, detective fiction. Best sellers. Political stuff.

But then politics via social media became more absorbing. This was during Trump I. Since then, if I'm in bed reading, I'm as apt to be scrolling through Twitter as I am to be reading the latest from Elizabeth Strout. 

This year, I committed to doing a book a week, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to make it, even if I find myself on New Year's Eve racing through the collected Betsy, Tacy, Tib novels of Maud Hart Lovelace, the favorite author of my childhood.

Two of the books I read this year were novels focused on the lives - the pretty crummy lives - of a couple of white working class guys who had fallen off the cliff and into the underbelly of society.

I'd never read anything by Barbara Kingsolver, but my brother had Demon Copperhead. So why not. Heartbreaking but great. (I will definitely pick up her other works.)

Demon Copperhead (Damon Fields) is pretty much doomed from the start. He's born in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Virginia coal country, an area that had already, for a couple of generations, been hollowed out by the decline of the coal industry. Sure, coal mining black-lunged you into an early grave, but it was good, hard, honest, purposeful work. And then it was gone.

So Damon was born into a not so good, definitely hard, not always honest, and seldom purposeful life. A young, reckless father, dead before Damon was born. (I think: I'm going from sketchy memory. Anyway, Damon never knew his father.) A decent and loving but weak (and drug addicted) mother who died when he was 11, pushing him into a beyond gruesome foster care system. 

The book follows Damon from a while before the death of his mother until young adulthood. 

There were a few redeeming features to his life. The kind and caring Peggotts provide him with family and stability, up to the point where they can no longer offer him that, given that their lives are challenged by the fact that the elder Peggotts and their one child who "made it" as a nurse are constantly having to take people in (children and adults) who've been victimized by the often inescapable forces of their home town's downward spiral. They're there for Damon - and all the alcoholic, drug abusing, violent members of their extended family - until they can't be. 

In his early teens, Damon takes off from a wildly miserable foster home and finds/discovers his paternal grandmother and his great uncle, odd but decent people who manage to get him on his feet until they can set him up with a permanent home. 

The permanent home is with the town's high school football coach and his daughter, the quirky high school smart-girl weirdo, who brings out the okay to be a smart boy weirdo - he's a cartoonist - in Damon. But it's the coach who really provides Damon with his identity: home town hero football star. Until a hideous injury during a game puts the end to Damon's football career and sets him on the path to oxy addiction and a downward life spiral. (How the Sacklers sold their ways into millions by promoting their wares and setting up the pillmill doctors that fecklessly provided the prescriptions that ended up addicting half the young folks in town is a harrowing subtext of a good swath of the book.)

Demon Copperhead is engrossing, terrifying, maddening. But toward the end we know that Damon will find redemption, as there are glimmers of good work, good friends, a good woman. 

The other book that centered on the life of a working-class white guy was Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III, an author I had long liked, admired, and read. (I also liked, admired, and read his father, Andre Dubus II.) Unlike Damon/Demon, Tom Lowe is a grownup. And he didn't live in Godknowswhere, Virginia but in the suburbs of Boston.

We meet Tom in middle age, but we learn that his early life wasn't anywhere near as Dickensian as Damon's was. But it was difficult. Tom managed to find a way out: a couple of years at UMass, the love of a great woman, a son, an interesting and lucrative career as a contractor - work that defined him and which he loved - and a home that he'd built by hand for his family.

But Tom was one fall of the roof away from losing everything that mattered to him in his life, as once he's been dreadfully injured and loses his ability to work, he's spiraling into drug and alcohol addiction. And life without the wife, the son, the house, the job.

Damon's life is lived in a poor, remote, completely beleaguered community. Tom's is on the fringes of a prosperous, educated community, a  world full of struggling single mothers on welfare, of cruddy Section 8 housing, of petty (and not so petty) criminals, of the daily humiliations that come with poverty (crummy clothing, crummy teeth), of the daily temptations: drugs, alcohol, petty criminality.

The novel ends on a minor note of optimism. We do get the sense that Tom will be okay. Or okay enough. 

What was most interesting about these novels was that they focus on the blue collar, working class. (It could be argued that Damon's world wasn't even that.) So many novels and short stories chronicle the lives of middle and upper-middle class people. Those people aren't working in Walmart, a prison, landfill. They're doctors/lawyers/professors/techies/ad-men/clergy. Given all the MFA's out there, lead characters are often writers. The kind of liberal elites who live in blue states (or blue dots in red states) and vote Democrat. Certainly not the flyover state working stiffs who have delivered us into the maws of Trump II. 

But the last couple weeks have, naturally, got me thinking of WHAT JUST HAPPENED and how, to its shame and the detriment of the country, the Democratic party stopped trying to talk to working class folks even though its Democratic policies (as half-baked as they might be) actually deliver whatever material support and comfort those working class folks get out of government. 

Not going to get any further into that now, but the election did get me thinking about the forgotten man and woman whose votes have put us on the eve of what could well end up being destruction of so much that I/we value. And brings nothing other than some emotional relief, some grim satisfaction, to the voters. 

Sigh.

I don't think that either Damon or Tom would have voted for Trump. Damon might not have voted at all. He might have been a Bernie bro who voted for Jill Stein. Maybe his girlfriend, who I'm sure by now he's married to and has had kids (and grandkids) with  - the book takes place in the late 1980's-early 1990's - would have gotten him to vote for Kamala Harris. Tom would have been a diehard Democrat.

Maybe I'm just fan-fictioning here. Because I liked both of these characters, I don't want them to be Trumpers. But it seems to me we'd be better off if we paid more attention - in both our fiction and in real life - to people who don't shop at Trader Joe's, listen to NPR, or live in communities that aren't stricken by drugs, lack of opportunity, and other terrible things.

Just sayin'.