A Pulitzer for two

Two books shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, something that has never happened in the prize’s 105 years. The two ­novels, Demon Copperhead (Harper 2022) by Barbara Kingsolver and Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books 2022) also share a worldview that comes straight from the narrative that gave us Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “tax the rich” gown at the 2021 Met Gala: The system is and long has been rigged against the little guy.

The Pulitzer Prizes, established by the newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer, were originally intended to award excellence in journalism and literature. But the Columbia University–led organization makes no bones about its current decision-making process. According to the prize’s website, the 23-person board that selects the winners “has grown less conservative over the years in matters of taste.”

Demon Copperhead illustrates this well. According to Kingsolver, Americans are categorized into two predetermined groups: those with privilege and those without. Her Pulitzer winner is a retelling of David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’ classic novel, and it tells the story of a poor Appalachian boy. Demon (whose real name is Damon) is the redheaded child of a drug-abusing, single mother living in a trailer park. Most of the time, the next-door neighbors look after Demon.

On his 11th birthday, Demon winds up in a foster home run by an abusive man the boys call “Creaky.” “Fast Forward” (a play on Steerforth), the unnamed leader of the boys, takes Demon under his wing. But Fast Forward proves a bad influence and introduces the elementary-aged boys to drugs by passing out “special” brownies after lights-out. From there, Demon travels to various foster homes and meets his long-lost grandmother. He becomes a local football legend in high school, but his triumph is short-lived when he injures his knee on the field. A ­doctor prescribes OxyContin for the pain, leading Demon toward complete addiction.

Set in Lee County, Va., during the 1990s, the story portrays the historical reality of Big Pharma’s exploitation of Appalachia. In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to misrepresenting the addictive nature of OxyContin but continued to provide incentives to doctors to prescribe it, specifically in rural areas like Lee County. In the story, several of Demon’s loved ones overdose.

Some strong warnings are in order, and they will make this a book most will want to avoid. For the drugs alone, the book is pretty heavy. Demon’s language is also foul enough to rival movies like Pulp Fiction. Given his upbringing, it makes sense that his words aren’t peppered with “gee whiz,” but the bad language is extreme and excessive. Some of the sections are downright pornographic, and it feels like the author is fantasizing rather than sticking to the story. Demon’s childhood best friend is “queer.”

Much like Dickens’ novel, Demon Copperhead is a couple hundred pages too long, but it lacks the sense of ­gospel-motivated hopefulness that has kept David Copperfield on high school reading lists for decades.

The book underscores the brokenness of the foster system but relies on a skewed view of morality. While the narrator suggests that Demon deserves some of the consequences of his actions, most of the blame can be attributed to “the powers stacked up against us before we were born.”

The second prizewinner suggests who those powers might be.

Hernan Diaz’s Trust (Riverhead 2022) begins with the story of Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen. Benjamin, a wealthy financier, makes a considerable profit when the stock market crashes in 1929. Because of his skillful and timely trades, the ­public blames him for the Great Depression.

Helen develops symptoms of schizophrenia, and Benjamin takes her to a sanitarium in Switzerland to seek a miracle cure. After enduring an early form of electroshock therapy, Helen passes away. Benjamin continues investing, but it is clear that his glory days are over.

Later in the novel, it is revealed that the Rasks are a fictional couple based on Andrew and Mildred Bevel. An author named Harold Vanner wrote about them in a novel called Bonds, the first section of Trust. Bevel is furious with the way his wife Mildred is portrayed as a lunatic, and he hires a secretary named Ida Partenza to help him tell the story from his perspective.

The second part of Trust is framed as Bevel’s autobiography. He depicts Mildred as a gentle, happy homemaker with a love for beauty and music, and he blames the Federal Reserve and reckless consumers for the market’s failure. “It is through the sum of daring individual actions that this nation has risen above all others,” he dictates to Ida. “And that our greatness comes only from the free interplay of singular wills.”

But Ida soon realizes that Andrew is so powerful that he can bend reality at will. The novel is elaborately told in four parts, and each character’s distinct perspective provides another piece to the story’s puzzle. There is one misuse of the Lord’s name but no other foul language, and there are no sex scenes.

It’s a great story and enjoyable to read, but the author suggests that the way people become rich and remain so is always by gaming the system, so American exceptionalism must be a lie they tell to save face.

At least for the novel category, the 2023 Pulitzer winners clearly highlight ideology about victims and oppressors. And so, for now, the Pulitzer Prizes remain less about telling an excellent story than telling the “right” story. And the progressive story du jour sounds something like AOC’s gown.