REVIEW: Small Great Things - Jodi Picoult

People ask me how I pick books to read – do I look at the Bestsellers list? Do I look at Goodreads recommendations? Do I look at what other book bloggers are spazzing over? I do all of the above, but more often than not, I refer to a short list of writers whose releases provide enough and more literary satisfaction for me and ensure I’m well fed. Picoult leads this list.

Her books compulsorily have three ingredients: a plot that mandates a tissue box by your side, a writing style that gives you the benefit of walking in the shoes of different characters to look around and judge for yourself but most importantly, characters that can’t be classified as good or evil – in the end, no one is blameless. Everyone is human.

Picoult gets in my head and confuses with my ideologies. This is also why she’s one of the writers I hate the most. Her books always tackle subjects that are to be debated over tea, (possibly) in raised voices at book clubs, and keep you up at night wondering if the characters made the wisest choices and had you been in their place, would you have done it any differently. Needless to say, when I heard she had a book coming out about racism in contemporary society, I confidently dropped big bucks without even pausing to look at what everyone had to say about it.

I hope the panda was a nice touch

Confession #1: I was in a reading slump. You can verify that by merely looking at the date of publication of my previous post on this blog. Maybe I still am in a reading slump – I’m unravelling a little at the edges. But I read this book from start to finish and I consider that an achievement.

Confession #2: I am not the best person to judge this book, and I won’t pretend to be one either. I have never stepped foot in the US, I am Indian and usually navigate in predominantly Indian circles. But, in case this is news for you, racism is not exclusive to multi-ethnic societies. You’d be surprised at how widespread, silent and invisible racial discrimination actually is and I am no stranger to it.  But, as usual, I digress.

I loved her choice of PoVs: the victim, the lawyer and the white supremacist – expected, but still commendable – because warping reality into what might make logic for a douchebag requires genius and intensive research. I dreaded reading Turd’s Turk’s PoV chapters because it felt like sliding underneath the slimy skin of a monster. This isn’t my first time: Amy in Gone Girl, and Alfred in Salt to the Sea helped me mentally steel myself against Turk’s viciousness and feel pity for the likes of him. You can never justify their actions, but you can understand them.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t Ruth or Kennedy or Turk that intrigued me. It was Adisa. Adisa is such a solid character – so very real – in her blunt stubbornness, her own racist inclinations – a lot of spice with a dash of sugar. I wish Picoult wrote Book #0.5 from Adisa’s eyes – I want to know if she really sees the world in black and white or in Technicolor but pretends otherwise. I was especially impressed by how she weaved the past and the present in her narrative, not jarring against each other, but providing the other a context for us to understand better.

This book really messed with my head – I forged through the constant volley of questions thrown at me, taking breaks in between (you can’t read this at a stretch, nope) to mull over the answers and maybe pretend like I didn’t know them. And as I drew near the end, I began to dread the signature Picoult twist (usually someone you least expect and care about the most drops dead) and I wasn’t disappointed.

Another thing I love about Picoult is the copious amount of research she dedicates into her work. I despise inaccuracies or misrepresentation, especially when you’re dealing with sensitive matter, and this book wouldn’t have been easy for her to write. A white woman trying to voice the discriminated? It would have been intimidating, considering that she knows what she’s setting herself up against. But she did it, anyways.

Most of all, I loved the title. Small Great Things, is a reference to a Martin Luther King quote, like she explains in her Author’s Note. The plot is essentially a quest for a greater victory, but the actual greatness of the novel was in the small victories. When the father held his faceless newborn. When Ruth touched the baby. When Kennedy understood what racism actually means. Small great things like that.

VERDICT: Just do yourself a favour and read it please.

P.S. Miss Picoult, if you're reading this, thank you for this book. Also a huge thank you for the epilogue which restored my faith in humanity. 

When The Authors Get It Wrong

That is one damn scary thought. I really don’t have any statistical proof when I say this; just making a naïve observation, but I think that the majority of bookworms lead extraordinarily ordinary lives. As in not terminally ill, not a psychopath, not an assassin, have never been raped, don’t have Asperger’s, don’t have LGBT related acceptance issues, are not Holocaust victims, don’t have dead parents, lovers, or best friends. And that one line just described the themes explored in about the majority of realistic YA novels.

So why are they written? If I had cancer (God forbid), I really don’t think I would have like to read The Fault In Our Stars ­– would you? Would you like to read about how a girl in remission meets her one true love at a support group who in the end dies? Or My Sister’s Keeper where Kate’s cancer felt like some deux ex machina tool to find a boyfriend who also dies? I’d most probably read some chick-lit day in and out and celebrate Meg Ryan and Katherine Heigl movies and lots of K-drama. And maybe some of those inspirational books people in my life feel obligated to buy me.

So these stories are written for the sake of the ones with extraordinarily ordinary lives. So that we can empathize – like Atticus advises Scott to climb into someone’s skin and walk around it if she wanted to understand a person. All this bigotry and hate in this world bubbles up from the fear of the unknown – maybe gays are mistakes of God and they are just a blemish on this world, right? Thus marks the entry of anti-LGBT activists.

Speaking for myself, I would have to say that books made me a better person. It is with some shame that I admit this, but I’ve been brought up in a society that is extremely prejudiced. Where mentally-challenged kids are openly referred to as “retards” – I haven’t heard a more polite term in my mother-tongue. Where gays are freak shows. Where cancer patients are regarded as sorry sights. (Please don’t judge us – we’re growing).

So that now we’ve answered the question of Why These Books, let’s move on to the title of this post. How thorough is your book? It’s shit-scary even contemplating about writing a book that features these issues – I mean, damn it, how do you do justice to your character? Fine, so you have a way with words and you feel like there’s a story waiting to be told. But your character’s voice. His agony. Her strength. How do you put it into words if you’ve never been through it, personally?

Research. Lots of it. Interviews with people like your character, their loved ones, doctors, psychologists, reading memoirs, war-accounts – the whole shebang. Katherine Stockett wrote about her fears of not being able to write in the voice of a wronged black maid in the South in the Author’s Note in her The Help. And I totally understand her. I don’t know much the book came under fire for political incorrectness but I do know that it affected me in some way. And GOD – Jodi Picoult. See http://www.jodipicoult.com/faqs.html for an idea of the research involved in her books. Just reading it made me tired and awed at these superheroes. And maybe you should also read Patricia McCormick’s Sold and Never Fall Down and Cut to expand your list of brave authors.

But what if they are still wrong? Murphy’s Law, being what it is, is bound to turn up author inaccuracies. The idea of this post came when I was scrolling through the reviews on GR after I had finished reading Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls. While I was reading the book, the thought that kept popping was why the hell she was known as the Author of Speak when Wintergirls was this good. If you aren’t a cutter (like me), don’t have an eating disorder (like me), don’t know what it feels like to hear that your best friend committed suicide (like me), then like me, you will feel short of breath at the magic Anderson wields with mere words. I mean. That Book. Is. Just. And I provided those conditional clauses in my judgement because I really don’t know how you would feel about it if you were Lia. It’s not a book you read curled up with a coffee in hand; it’s a book you clutch to firmly trying shit-hard not to fucking cry, and pray for girls like Lia and Cassie. So once I had recommended my GR friends how they should really read it, I happened to see some other reviews. That left me confused. So what was LHA doing? Merely showing off her writing skills and shamming us?

I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know if Jacob in Jodi Picoult’s House Rules is who a kid with Asperger’s actually is. I don’t know if Gabe in Beautiful Music For Ugly Children represents the trapped individual living in a body of the opposite sex. I don’t know if closure is as elusive as it was for Oskar Schell in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. But I do know that these books needed to be written because else we would continue thinking that we were “normal” or "okay" and they weren’t.