A Tale of Two Pulitzer Winners

A brief discussion about Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and Trust by Hernan Diaz

On May 7, 2023 it was announced that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction would be shared by two winners for the first time in the award’s history.

I knew very little about both books besides a passing familiarity with the authors, and Demon Copperhead having been recommended to me by a number of people in my audience.

I have a love/hate relationship with awards like these, whether this one for fiction, the Booker Prize, or the Academy Awards for Film. I think it’s easy to dismiss such attempts to rank art as political exercises, or as out of touch with the concerns of most regular people.

At the same time, as I looked at the previous Pulitzer winners for Fiction, I realized that of the seven I had read, I loved almost all of them. If you’re curious, the titles of the ones I’ve read are as follows: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (2001), Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2005), The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007), The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2014), All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2015), The Overstory by Richard Powers (2019), and The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (2020). And for the even more curious, the only one I really didn’t like was Gilead.

In order, my four favorites, of the seven above

So I decided to read this year’s winners. So let’s talk about Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and Trust by Hernan Diaz.

Long story short: I really enjoyed both books. But by the look of the Goodreads and Amazon reviews, I liked Trust (4.1 on Amazon with 6,916 ratings/3.87 on Goodreads with 34,836 ratings) a lot more than everyone else, and Demon Copperhead (4.6 on Amazon with 42,362 ratings/4.53 on Goodreads with 129,928 ratings) a bit less than everyone else.

In case you wanted another way to visualize this data to better compare

While the only real connection between these books is this prize, I do find the similarities between them fascinating. Both are about capitalism and the surrounding myths of the United States of America. While Demon Copperhead examines poverty, Trust shows us extreme wealth, and yet both dismantle myths about success or failure, and what it means to be “self-made” in this country. Both reveal systemic flaws and how the narrative about personal responsibility for the rich and poor are equally untrue, and yet the rich get much more influence over how their story is told. Even though they are so different, reading them in succession felt like seeing two sides of the same coin.

I am equally fascinated by the striking structural differences between the two works. Demon Copperhead is borrowing heavily from the narrative structure of Dickens’s David Copperfield, where one character is laying out their story from birth to maturity in linear fashion, with lots of individual events, painting a detailed picture of a life. And in this sense, the novel is an extraordinary achievement. The entire thing is packed to the brim with authentic details as it takes us through the American south starting in the early 2000s, with characters that feel fully alive in this time and place. I was fully invested in the story as I went on this emotional roller coaster with Demon.

Trust, on the other hand, has a much more playful structure. I’m loath to even discuss it in detail because the experience of reading without any idea of what the book was about or how things would be presented was thrilling. Each section was like another tumbler in a lock clicking into place, until finally it all works together.

For those of you who have read Trust, or don’t care about mild spoilers, there are four main sections. The first is a novel within the novel, detailing the rise of a rich and influential man and his wife, set in the 1920s in New York City. The second section is an excerpt from an uncompleted memoir by the “real” person who was the basis for the novel in section one. The third section follows the assistant/writer who helped our rich man write his memoir. And finally the fourth section is a series of entries from a diary of that man’s wife. It’s a glorious literary puzzle that reveals itself bit by bit. Each new section gives us a bigger piece of the whole picture, and also helps contextualize events and details from previous sections. Likewise, I found myself constantly evaluating what I was currently reading through the lens of what came before. The result was an extremely engaging and rewarding experience unlike anything I’ve read in years.

And perhaps I am too rough on these awards as I realize there are at least four other recent-ish Pulitzer winners that I would like to read, all of which have adaptations that have already been released or that are on the way. Those novels are: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009), A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011), The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016), and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2017).

I would recommend both Demon Copperhead and Trust, and would love to dive deeper in the comments if any of you have read them and want to discuss.