I'm green with envy. I wish I could write like Jodi Picoult, who has churned out a novel a year for the last couple of decades, and done so very well, gathering millions of readers. The places she haunts are no more exotic than your and my family rooms. Her conflicts are not at all extraordinary, except in the way that really good writers can make the ordinary, extraordinary--she gets in there between moms and daughters, between husbands and wives. In a way all of her books are about "small great things."
And some, like her newest, Small Great Things, are about issues, maybe more about issues than about characters. Small Great Things is about an African-American nurse who's worked in a nursery for twenty years. Picoult's first chapter establishes not only her competence but her commitment, her sense of calling. Ruth Jefferson knows babies--let's put it that way. And we love her.
Into the ward comes a couple, skinheads, who see Ruth Jefferson as an African-American--well, as a n______, the enemy. They tell the supervisor they won't have that woman touching their baby. The setup is almost too neat: soon, an delivery room emergency thrusts Ruth Jefferson into a position where she simply must care for the skinhead baby, the baby goes into cardiac arrest, and dies. Turk, the skinhead father, sees Ruth being physical on the dying baby, trying to save her life. He assumes the worst, and we've got a story.
Small Great Things a perfect book for travelling, so engaging you can't quite not listen, but so breezy that it doesn't steal your attention away from where it should be--on the road. On Monday, we were spellbound for the three hours and more it took for us to drive north for friends and olebollen (to die for). The novel is great and thoughtful entertainment.
Picoult uses three voices to tell the story--Ruth, Turk, and Kennedy, Ruth's rich-white-girl lawyer. And, like just about every storyteller in her genre--and mine--Picoult goes out of her way to be sure that none of the major characters is all good or all bad. Well, at least not all-bad. Turk is a racist pig, a scum bag, a bloody bigot; but, the kid had an awful childhood. He virtually worships his wife, and the baby? When it's born, it could just as well have been born in a manger--you know? When it dies, all hell breaks loose.
Picoult does just about everything in her power to humanize the guy, and because she does, I find Turk a little bit too hard to believe. I can't really suspend my disbelief for a reason that I'll try to summarize this way: any man (or woman) who can love that well, that deeply, can't hate that much. I don't believe Turk.
Small Great Things does great things by dragging us directly into the racial mess that exists in this country, and it does so with a familiarity that is both disarming and engaging. The Reverend Al Sharpton makes an unmistakable appearance, even though Picoult gives him a different name.
But whenever Turk talks, my defenses rise because, right or wrong, I have trouble believing that someone that smart could be that hateful.
"There are good people on both sides," our President said after the tragedy at Chancellorsville some months ago. Bigots are good people too, he might have said. Maybe he's right. Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe if I knew Turks, I'd think this one less of an animal for his reeking bigotry. Maybe my politics outfit me with blinders.
I wish I could write like Jodi Picoult. Small Great Things was an absolutely great travel companion. It moves our culture's problems with race up front and personal. It would make a great classroom novel.
But I don't believe it. Maybe I should, but I don't.
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