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George and Rufus (Rue) are born one year apart into grinding poverty of a Nova Scotia community, to a violently abusive father and a frightened well-intentioned mother. They have mixed heritage, part Black, part Mi’kmaq. Battered and hungry, they struggle with learning and abandon school after several attempts at grade three. 

George is stolid, strives to be good, serves briefly (and badly) in the military, and is happiest doing heavy physical work for farms, gardens, and woodlots. But he can never hold a job for long. He marries Blondola and they start a family in Fredericton, New Brunswick. 

Rue is more dashing, calculating, and slippery. He has a self-taught talent for piano and cultivates an odd form of jazz. He falls in love twice and loses both times--first to an accidental death and next to his own imprisonment. Arrested for theft, he serves two years in prison and, upon his release, barges into George’s marginal existence, contributing nothing and menacing the precarious but loving home. 

When Blondola goes into hospital for the birth of her daughter, the doctor refuses to let her leave until his bill is paid. George needs money desperately. Rue convinces him to use a hammer to stun a white man – any white man—and take his money. Together they settle on targeting a taxi driver, but the man who responds to the call is George’s friend. He cannot go through with it, but Rue clobbers the driver, cajoles George into robbing the dying man and dealing with the evidence.

The brutal murder and shockingly clumsy aftermath of their barely disguised deeds results in their arrest. During the police interrogation, George tries to explain his innocence and blames his brother. They are tried within the racially intolerant British-inherited court system that wrongly flatters itself to have avoided American excesses of racism. They are executed on the gallows, hanging side-by-side. 

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This novel recasts Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield for modern day as a literary take on the opioid addiction crisis in the U.S. during the 1990s and 2000s with apparent connections to Beth Macy’s nonfiction book, Dopesick, and the eight-part TV miniseries of the same name it spawned. The author, Barbara Kingsolver, assures potential readers that having read David Copperfield is not a prerequisite for comprehending and appreciating Demon Copperhead.   

Demon Copperfield, a name that evolved naturally enough in early childhood from his birth name, Damon Fields, was born into entrenched poverty in the heart of Appalachia, Lee County, Virginia. He tells his story starting from when he drops out of his drug-addicted mother’s womb onto the floor of a rented trailer, to when as a young adult, he makes a last-chance effort at breaking loose from the life-threatening clutches of Lee County. In between, his stepfather frequently beats him bloody, his mother dies from a drug overdose, he enters foster care, attends school off and on, and works assorted jobs, many of which involve illegal, unethical, and dangerous activities. All the while he is variously abused, starved, and exploited.  

Demon shares his plight with many others in the community, and though they help each other as best they can, nearly all of them become ensnared in the same traps—drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, hazardous occupations, unfinished education, familial disintegration, and societal abandonment. For Demon, these conditions and experiences obliterated any vision of a future free of entrapments, let alone one of prosperity and happiness. “Here, all we can ever be is everything we’ve been. I came from a junkie mom and foster care,” is how he assessed his prospects (p. 461).  

Amidst all this suffering and bleakness, an observant and caring teacher discovers Demon’s talent in graphic arts, and he gets a peek at a path to commercial success. He has to first fight off what he knows of “Lee County being a place where you keep on living the life you were assigned” (p. 460). His story turns to this fight and onto this path. 

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Izzy is a teenager who has been in foster care for a decade since the age of 7 when her mother was imprisoned and judged insane for having killed her father. She struggles with a desire to cut herself. Her current foster parents, Harry and Peg, seem kindly and engage Izzy in their task to catalogue artifacts from the nearby state asylum that has recently closed. 

Izzy is given the journal of Clara, a patient who, at age 18 in 1929, was pregnant by her Italian lover, Bruno. She was committed to the asylum by her angry father.  Clara gave birth, but her baby girl was taken from her. She observed how the brutality of the hospital damaged those who did not belong there, eventually provoking the mental illness it purported to treat. With the help of a gravedigger, Bruno planned an escape, but their plan was uncovered, and Bruno died.

Izzy’s own story unfolds as she works her way through the journal, subjected to bullying and tormented by her anxieties. Peg kindly arranges to take Izzy to see her dying birth mother in prison, where she learns that the murder of her father was to prevent him from abusing young Izzy.  

Spoiler alert! Izzy learns from an elderly nurse that the asylum director took Clara’s baby for himself and that Clara is still alive. She reunites the mother and child, who is now a grown woman. Izzy joyfully learns that Peg and Harry will formally adopt her.

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 His situation is a mystery. Caregivers marvel at how he had been able to survive alone in the woods for several years. They wonder if he ran away from an abusive home, or if he was deliberately abandoned because of his disability. A crisis emerges when a woman appears claiming to be his relative. Itard eventually abandons the effort to educate Victor, but he is allowed to continue living with the Guérins.

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The novel's narrator is a widowed 58-year-old Swiss-born physician, Howard J. Rageet, who lives in New York City. His son is a pediatrician, his daughter a medical student. Rageet himself is terminally ill. He is writing a "little biography," of Mary Mallon, the infamous "healthy carrier" also known as Typhoid Mary. Rageet's grandfather, also a doctor, had kept a journal about Mary and his rivalry with his friend, (the real) George A. Soper, whose life's work became tracking Mary and proving that she was responsible for the typhoid outbreaks. Elaborating on the journal, Rageet recounts Mary's life in America.

Born Maria Anna Caduff in the same part of Switzerland as Rageet's ancestors, she arrives in New York Harbor in 1868, aged 13, on a crowded immigrant ship, a fifth of whose passengers had died en route from Europe. The dead include Mary's family. She had been taken care of by the ship's cook, who evidently both taught her to cook and used her for sex. When the ship docks, Mary tries to jump overboard, but is stopped by a physician, Dorfheimer, who smuggles her through Ellis Island and takes her home with him. He is also a pedophile, and he has sex with her. Rageet calls this kidnapping a "humane, benevolent crime." Not long after, Dorfheimer dies of typhoid fever.

Rageet's "ballad" then traces Mary's various positions as a cook (and, often, sexual object), most of which end quickly when the household is infected. She has two relationships that do not lead to the disease. One is with a small girl who has Down Syndrome. Once her connection to typhoid is suspected, the child's family hire Mary to live alone with the child and care for her, hoping the child will be infected and die. The child never becomes ill. The other is with a disillusioned anarchist, Chris Cramer. She lives with him and falls in love with him, but he is not sexually interested in her.

Soper encounters Mary when he is asked by a wealthy Oyster Bay family, her former employers, to investigate a typhoid outbreak in their household. He manages to track her down and eventually, after much resistance, she is arrested, tested, and quarantined. She escapes and continues to work as a cook until her re-arrest. Promising to try and imagine Mary's motives, Rageet breaks off his narrative. He is dying. The novel ends with a postscript written by Rageet's daughter. Implying that her father committed suicide, she tells of Mary's stroke and the last years of her life as a paraplegic, and she provides a final document, the menu for one of the very elaborate meals Mary would have cooked.

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Miriam Himmelfarb is the middle of three daughters of holocaust survivors Rachael and Daniel, who are secular Jews born in Europe.  Safe in the house on Lippincott in an immigrant neighborhood of Toronto, Sondra, Miriam and Esther grow up hearing their parents’ nightmare screams every night. They bask in genuine affection and learn to respect the horrific history of their elders whose needs come to dominate their own. Their father angers at the slightest provocation, and every tiny domestic issue is a reminder of Auschwitz. 

These conditions become their own form of trauma. Daniel allows his child-abusing younger brother into the home where he secretly molests Sondra. The girl flees to live on the street in prostitution and addiction. Esther turns to religion and marries within the faith, finding comfort in traditions. Following in the footsteps of her professor mother, Miriam becomes a philosopher. She briefly moves out during her studies to live in the avant-garde Rochdale College, but she is unable to build a life outside the parental home and returns, denying herself independence and love. The loss of her mother by carefully planned suicide is terrifying.

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In Melbourne, Australia, Hector and Aisha are hosting a big barbecue for their families and friends who come with several children. Hector’s somewhat controlling Greek parents appear too, bringing along too much food and their chronic disapproval of his non-Greek wife despite the two healthy grandkids and her success as a veterinarian. Aisha’s less-well-off friends, Rosie and Gary, arrive with their cherubic-looking son, Hugo, who at age three, is still breastfed and being raised according to a hippie parenting style that manages to be both sheltering and permissive. Hugo has a meltdown over a cricket game, which the older kids have let him join.  He raises a bat to strike another child, when Hector’s cousin, Harry, intervenes to protect his own son. Hugo kicks Harry who slaps him. Rosie and Gary call it child abuse and notify the police. 

The aftermath of the slap is told in several fulsome chapters, each devoted to a different individual’s perspective: among them, Hector, Aisha, Harry, Rosie, Hector’s father, and the teenaged babysitter Connie. Harry is rendered miserable by Rosie and Gary’s aggressive lawsuit against him. Connie believes she is in love with a philandering, substance-abusing Hector who in turn has unscrupulously led her on. Recognizing its alienation of her friends, Rosie sticks to her legal pursuit of Harry although she worries about the drain on their meagre finances, the exposure of Gary's drinking, and the anticipated criticism of their parenting style. Aisha is fed up with her husband’s edginess and submission to his parents, and she flirts with escape in the form of a handsome stranger at a conference. 

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The world is a big place – 7.4 billion people and counting. As much as we all enjoy the game of finding our doppelganger in a crowd, there probably isn’t anyone in the world who is exactly like us. With a genetic code of over 3 billion base pairs, of which there are innumerable permutations, we would be hard pressed to find a clone of ourselves even if the world had 7 trillion people. The exception is if you were born with an identical sibling. But then again, you would know if you had a twin. Wouldn’t you?

The documentary Three Identical Strangers tells the unbelievable story of Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman – three identical triplets who were separated at birth and serendipitously reunited at the age of 19. The film takes us through the circumstances of their reunion, highlighting the brothers’ instant rapport over their similarities and the ensuing fame resulting from the public fascination with their extraordinary story. It began as a euphoria-filled saga complete with talk show interviews, movie cameos, and even a successful restaurant which they called “Triplets”.

The honeymoon phase ended in horrific fashion once the parents of the respective siblings began asking questions as to why the brothers were separated in the first place. A journalist who had been investigating the triplets’ adoption agency, Louise Wise Services, helped to uncover the details of an elaborate study performed by a child psychiatrist named Dr. Peter Neubauer. In this study, each brother was placed into a home which had another adoptive sister, and specifically assigned to a family of lower, middle, and upper-class backgrounds. While the exact details of the study objective remain unknown, it appears that the study was trying to determine whether psychiatric illness was correlated more strongly with genetics or with developmental environment; this is referred to colloquially as a “nature vs. nurture” experiment.

The implications were earth-shattering. The brothers struggled to cope with the realization that they had been marionettes in some sort of sick experiment, with Dr. Neubauer pulling the strings the whole time. Even worse was the fact that there were possibly several more identical siblings with the same story who were deprived of their biological soul mate, all at the behest of Neubauer and his associates. In fact, other sets of identical siblings were eventually made aware of the experiment, and did have the chance to meet, albeit many years after their birth.

The triplets also learned that their biological mother had serious psychiatric problems – hence their inclusion in the study. All three brothers had behavioral difficulties as adolescents, and it was distressing to consider whether their issues may have been exacerbated by the separation anxiety they experienced upon being separated at birth. In particular, Eddy suffered from worsening episodes of bipolar disorder throughout his life. In 1995, at the age of 33, he committed suicide. He is notably absent for the duration of the documentary, with Bobby and David narrating much of the film. Today, they are still trying to uncover the particulars of Dr. Neubauer’s study, but the research records remain under seal at Yale University until 2066. They may never know the full extent of what was done to them and why.

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