I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead,1 and the ending—oh, the ending. I am going to spoil it here shortly, so if you haven’t read it yet, maybe do. But I’ll give a little warning before truly giving anything away, so read on for now if you like.
I read the novel on my Kindle, a medium that I don’t like as much as print but that I conceded to last year as a way to feasibly travel with large stacks of books. I use it with some frequency now, often for books that have lengthy waitlists at the library.
In any case, reading Demon Copperhead on the Kindle meant that I had the odd experience of knowing the end was coming but not really knowing how soon it would be. With a physical book in hand, you can feel it, and—if you’re like me—thumb through to the end, impatiently counting pages with that mixture of desires that a good book elicits. Wanting to get to the end and wanting to prolong being inside the story all at once.
But with the Kindle, I had the percentage marker in the bottom corner, which is particularly deceptive for a long book (Demon Copperhead clocks in at 560 pages.) I knew it would end before the marker reached 100% because there is always end material—but how soon, I didn’t know. And couldn’t casually flip to see as I would with a material book.
So I kept getting to the end of a chapter and wondering: Is this it? Did I reach the end? Did I misremember the number of chapters? Is it finished?
The series of false endings—all the places the novel might have ended but didn’t—had me thinking about what makes a good ending. What do we (or at least, what do I) look for at the end of a story?
The patience of Kingsolver’s writing, throughout the novel but particularly at the end, impressed me. Not just that the pace didn’t feel rushed, but that the text seemed to be waiting for the proper ending to arise.
And—when it got there—it stopped there. It didn’t go past it. Didn’t give the reader more than it needed to, didn’t slip into the gratituous or excessive.
Endings are difficult, I think, because we don’t really have them in life. Not in the way a story does, anyway. I have a vivid memory of being a child, sitting in the backseat of my family’s van or station wagon, driving through the cornfields of southern Minnesota on the way to or from my grandparents’ house in Iowa for some holiday or another, radio playing or headphones in, when a sort of cinematic feeling would descend. I’d feel the moment as an ending, the music melding with the slanted sun. I’d imagine credits rolling or a book cover falling down over us from the sky, as the road stretched on ahead and behind.
And then—well, we’d continue driving. The song would shift, and maybe the feeling would continue for a bit, but I knew we’d eventually get where we were going and it would have faded. No clear cut stop of one moment and beginning of the next, just more of the same continuous existence.
Sometimes I’d try to memorize the exact moment. I’d try to decide that I’d remember this particular second, even though it didn’t really matter. Small details. Smaller than the song that was playing or the color of my shoes. I’d try to fix in my head the wrapper that had fallen on the ground, the rim of crumbs on the cup holder, the angle my brother’s head was tilted in front of me as he slept.
I’m inventing now, of course—I remember none of that. I remember only the act of trying to remember, even as I recalled all the times I’d tried this before and forgotten it all. I wouldn’t remember because the next moment would arise to replace the current one. There would be no stop, not even a pause. It’s not even right to say the moment would pass—it would bleed into the next moment, indistinguishable from it.
And so one of the challenges of fictional endings, I think, is trying to stop and continue all at once. To arrive somewhere but make the reader feel it moving on past the page. To create a feeling of completeness without turning the story into something that is contained, trite, overly knowable. To create a feeling of incompleteness without turning the story into something ungraspable, pointless, unsatisfying.
This, I think, is what Kingsolver does at the end of Demon Copperhead.
Before any spoilers, a synposis: Demon Copperhead is based somewhat on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, but set in present-day Appalachia, amid the opioid epidemic. Confession: I have not read David Copperfield, so I have no idea to what degree Kingsolver is drawing on Dickens, other than its focus on childhood poverty and the opening paragraph. Like David Copperfield, this story begins with Demon telling the story of his own birth: “First, I got myself born” (1). From there, the novel follows Demon’s early childhood to adulthood. The book jacket summarizes it as follows: “In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, ahletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.”
The word “plot” is interesting, because the majority of the book feels less like plot and more like following. And though there’s plenty of conflict, it doesn’t have the kind of breathless quality I associate with action-packed or overly dramatic stories. For the first part of the book, we’re mostly just seeing where Demon’s life goes. For me, plot really doesn’t come into play until Demon is injured in a football game and becomes addicted to the painkillers he is prescribed. He’s been using drugs from a young age (and been around them from an even younger one), but there’s a decided shift at this point. The question that’s been hovering the entire time—How will Demon’s life turn out?—intensifies and narrows. Will he be able to overcome addiction or will he, like his mom and others, succumb to it?
With this kind of question, the ending matters a lot. Perhaps more than it might in another story. As a reader, I genuinely didn’t know how it would end—but I did know that the ending would determine the type of story this was and how I felt about it. If it ended tragically, that would say one thing. Triumphantly, another. Ambiguously, another. From a character standpoint, I was rooting for Demon. But from a craft standpoint, I wondered how Kingsolver could pull off a happy ending without making it feel false.
The possibility for multiple endings is perhaps another reason why I kept thinking the novel had ended before it did.
And so, the spoilers:
The novel reaches a climax at chapter 59: Demon returns to the site of his father’s death, a place called Devil’s Bathtub. The specifics are complicated—he’s tricked into going there—but it is fraught with narrative and personal significance for Demon, ending with the deaths of two brother-figures, Fast Forward and Hammer. It’s a moment of grief, reckoning, and turmoil. Chapter 60 ends with June—an aunt/mother figure to Demon—telling Demon that he needs to leave to get help. She says that she will help him, but that he has to stay away for at least a year. In the last line of the chapter, Demon says, “I told her I would think about it. She had to know I was lying” (501).
Not an ending—not yet. But gesturing towards a possible one. Demon will not get help; he will reject June’s offer and head towards his own version of Devil’s Bathtub.
The first false ending, for me, comes in the subsequent chapter, in which Demon leaves town, stops at a place called Sand Cave and spends the night sleeping on the ground. It finishes with the sentence: “If I lived till morning, I would walk down the mountain, find June, and tell her I was ready to fly” (508).
The story could have ended here—I could feel it ending here, as I read it. A positive turn without the certainty of recovery. A note of hope in the face of despair, without the promise that it would bear out.
It’s not a bad ending. It answers the question Will Demon be able to come addiction? with a lukewarm maybe. It shows a shift in his initial rejection of the idea; it shows his willingness to leave in order to come back.
It keeps the story entirely on the level of character, though—and entirely within that narrow question about addiction. It reduces Demon’s character arc to just that piece of his story. I wasn’t sure why the ending was unsatisfying when I first read it, but I think that’s it: if the story had ended there, it would have been a story about drug addiction and the importance of trying to overcome it, even if success is not guaranteed. Which is a somewhat unsatisfying message.
Chapter 61 sees Demon three years into his stay at a halfway house. The jump in time immediately made me wonder if this was the final chapter—perhaps Kingsolver would give just enough to show that Demon had been able to overcome the addiction. It ends with a line that sounds like an ending, though the content of the chapter suggests it isn’t: “And he said, I’m still figuring that part out” (517).
Again, a kind of open-ended conclusion that puts emphasis on trying, rather than whatever the outcome of that effort might be. The chapter doesn’t really feel like an ending, though, since it takes up Demon’s work as a cartoonist, and the final line—spoken by Demon’s collaborator, his foster-brother Tommy—seems to require some sort of response. Tommy is talking, not about life, but about how to portray the people and places of their childhood in light of the way they are often portrayed: as ignorant, backwards, laughable. As “hillbillies,” as “rednecks.”
Chapter 62, then, is Demon’s response: he produces first a website of comics, then a graphic novel on the “History of our People” (522) called “High Ground,” which he describes as “The two-hundred years war to keep body and soul together on our mountains” (524).
A much better ending than the previous ones. It shifts the focus from Demon’s addiction and recovery to larger ones about the role of story-telling, Demon’s complicated relationship to the place he comes from. Addiction, in this ending, is part of his story but not the sum of it. It’s contextualized within all of these other questions. The last paragraph reads:
I’ve made a number of false starts with this mess. You think you know where your own troubles lie, only to stare down the page and realize, no. Not there. It started earlier. Like these wars going back to George Washington and whiskey. Or in my case, chapter 1. First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me. Here we are. (526)
It has the feel of an ending, a good one this time. It calls back to the beginning. It acknowledges the complexity of Demon’s life, the way that it is mired in a broader history beyond his control, but also the decisions and agency he has had. It arrives in the present for a beat (“Here we are”) and seems to open up.
A good ending, I think. And yet—the story continues.
In the last two chapters, Demon returns home. It’s something that he is terrified to do. He’s been sober for a few years now and doesn’t know who he can safely see anymore. There are absences and memories that he’ll have to confront. But he’s convinced to go back, in part because he is consulting with his old art teacher about the book.
What emerges in the last chapters, however, is a longing that’s been underpinning the entire book, a longing for family, connection, friendship, belonging. Summary of this part will not do it justice, because it will necessarily sound clumsy, when in fact Kingsolver is very light with it.
The best I can do with it is this: Demon has been married before, has had several friendships and relationships that have shaped him profoundly, several instances of belonging in one way another, set alongside all the moments of rejection, mistreatment, loneliness. And so when Kingsolver begins hinting at Demon’s shifting feelings towards his friend Angus (a girl he mistook for a boy when he first moved into her father’s house, thanks to both her name and her attire), it doesn’t feel overly played in the way that some romance plots do. It’s a slow build, so that when the reader realizes Demon’s feelings (or, at least, when I did) it feels natural, like you’re discovering it as he’s starting to admit it to himself.
And then—even more delicately—Kingsolver lets the reader see that Angus reciprocates these feelings before Demon does himself. Almost like you’re in the position of a privileged friend, the kind who can often see such situations more clearly than the people inside them.
The story ends—truly ends—with Angus and Demon driving out to the sea, something he’s attempted and failed to do twice, something that’s set up as significant from the opening chapter about his birth. There’s a pleasure to this last scene of the two of them in the car, with the reader seeing Demon gradually (again, gradually) realize Angus’s feelings. He does, fully, and then the story ends:
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 Christansburg exit. Past Richmond, still pointed east. Headed for the one big thing I know is not going to swallow me alive. (546)
As with the previous non-ending, it concludes before an arrival, so it feels like an opening up rather than a closing shut. But it shifts the story once more; it does what I think is possibly the most difficult kind of ending to pull off. A happy one.
In Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter notes the challenges that happiness poses for narrative.2 “Stories begin when things start to go wrong,” he notes (210). At worst, happiness is “a form of narrative suicide” (210); at best,“boring” and “virtually non-narratable” (199). Happiness kills narrative in part because it purports to be complete, in and of itself:
As an emotion complete in its own magical circle, happiness requires nothing beyond what it already has. Longing, for example, years for an object that happiness has already found. Contentment certainly does not need more thoughts of speculations that might, in fact, endanger it. In this sense, happiness is typically blind to its own situation” (199).
Happiness, in the way that Baxter describes it, lacks movement—which does pose problems for plot and character. Plot by definition must move, and the best characters are dynamic, not static.
But endings don’t need to move—in fact, they’re the perfect place for a cessation of movement. The story needs to stop, so why not stop with happiness?
Often, I think, happy endings either don’t feel earned or don’t feel real. They cast the rest of the book as mere obstacle to get to this final point. And if the book is social portraiture—as Demon Copperhead is—it feels like a way of denying the reality of the world the characters must continue to live in.
Baxter concedes that happiness can be formulated in fiction, just that it is difficult and rare. In his analysis of Czeslaw Milosz’s “Gift,” he identifies two ways in which Milosz is able to craft happiness:
Point number 1: A mindful happiness knows, and acknowledges, everything from which it has been excluded or freed. It often has a frame of suffering around it.
Point number 2: Happiness, within a dramatic medium, requires an activity to serve as its vehicle. (204)
Demon Copperhead’s ending has both of these. There is a literal vehicle, the car, that is carrying the happiness. Happiness is encased in the action of driving to the coast, finally. Demon is intensely aware of the past as he drives—the moments that happiness has been excluded from, the sufferings he’s at least momentarily freed from.
More than that, the book ends with a mixture of fulfillment and longing. It’s not a static happiness, not at all. There’s the joy of Demon’s realization that Angus returns his desire, a moment of finding himself wanted and loved. The final shift into present tense fits Baxter’s point about happiness being “its own magical circle”—but the story ends before they arrive at the ocean.
The final scene, then, is a moment of happy longing for what lies ahead. And in the anticipation, we can feel the goodness of what is happening without having to believe that all will be smooth and perfect in the coming years, or even the coming minutes. The happiness lies, not just in the moment itself, but in the way it simultaneously fulfills and produces longing. It moves even as it rests. It pauses even as it speeds ahead.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Demon Copperhead. Harper, 2022.
Baxter, Charles. “Regarding Happiness.” Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Graywolf Press, 2008, pp. 197-214.