Jodi Picoult and the Anxious Parent

[groovedaddy]

IN THE NOVELS of Jodi Picoult, terrible things happen to children of middle-class parentage: they become terminally ill, or are maimed, gunned down, killed in accidents, molested, abducted, bullied, traumatized, stirred to violence. The assault on any individual family is typically mounted from angles multiple and unforeseen.

In “My Sister’s Keeper,” the first of Picoult’s 16 novels to be made into a feature film (it opens this Friday), a couple with a delinquent teenage son and a daughter who has acute promyelocytic leukemia conceive a third child to serve as her bone-marrow donor. Multiple operations on both girls follow over the span of many years, until the donor child, victim of a sort of abuse that is passing itself off as godliness, rebels at 13, devastating her mother by initiating legal proceedings to ensure her own corporeal autonomy.

Picoult’s storytelling revels in sequential miseries — no singular unhappiness ever seems sufficient. Various nightmares fuel the plot of “Nineteen Minutes,” a post-Columbine novel and one of her most popular books. Here, a midwife and her academic husband are largely blind to the depths of their son’s isolation — until he shoots close to a dozen of his classmates — just as they were blind to the drug problems and viciousness of an older son, who seemed to function so exceptionally. And yet they appear to be such lovely parents, so well-meaning and engaged (they read The Economist).

In Picoult’s fiction we rarely encounter characterologically bad parents. Instead, we meet mothers and fathers who try and fail, baroquely, to meet the current standards of caring for children — people who affect the deepest concern, who have absorbed the therapeutic language of talk shows and women’s magazines but who are congenitally unable to implement the idiom. Parental inadequacy and elaborate misfortune repeatedly conspire in her books to produce altogether new horrors; by the end of “My Sister’s Keeper,” the family is left to confront a tragedy unprompted by the central maladies, one meant to serve as a cosmic rebuke to the mother’s stilted management. (And one so insistent in its shock value that it may inspire the reader to deposit the book under the wheels of a minivan.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/magazine/21picoult-t.html?th&emc=th

[MISSDem]

1. A woman who I work with loves her books so I auomatically know

that I will not like them. So...I haven't and don't plan to read any of her books.

[groovedaddy]

2. Thank you for sharing. n.t

[hamerfan]

3. I've never read any of her books,

but they sound intriguing. The next time I'm at the library I will pick up a couple. Any suggestions on which to start with?
hamerfan

[abluelady]

4. I Used to Read Her

But find her newer books too annoying. If you are intrigued, read one of her older books.