October 7th, 2008
It finally hit me — what compelled me to take Jodi Picoult’s latest book off the shelf for today’s daily Book Blog.
I put CHANGE OF HEART on my desk, and went in to watch the presidential debates. Then I cleared 1,327 emails out of my inbox (seriously). And, now, after all that procrastination, I get it.
Jodi Picoult is bold. She takes issues that scare the heck out of most mainstream writers, and wrestles them into tightly woven, thrilling fiction. CHANGE OF HEART is about a grieving widow whose husband and daughter were killed by a young carpenter who has an unusual way of speaking. Eleven years later, the woman’s other daughter needs a heart transplant, and the carpenter — now on death row — is a medical match. We’ve got the death penalty, bioethics, and religious freedom. And, by the way, the carpenter seems to be performing miracles while on death row — water into wine, reviving a bird, calming the anguished — who does that remind you of.
In person, a few months ago, Jodi greets me in her hotel suite, exhausted from her travel, and facing back-to-back interviews, but she delivers her story-line — and the spark for the book — powerfully and persuasively. She wants to provoke discussion, she says.
This reminds me of another of her books — we’ve done probably half-a-dozen interviews over the years. This one was SALEM FALLS — about a schoolteacher put away for raping a girl in his class, and when he gets out, he travels to another town, and falls in love with the one woman who will give him work in her tavern. The schoolteacher had been falsely accused, but the new townspeople target him when they find out about his past — and meanwhile, the daughter of one of the richest men in town uses Wiccan spells to seduce him. And then she is raped.
That one hit closer to home — when I was the same age as that student, a schoolteacher seduced me into the woods, a thunderstorm broke, and we got soaked as he raped me. That’s not to tell you who was responsible for the rape in the book — remember the teacher was falsely accused before. Not my teacher — my favorite teacher, I might add — he did what I say now, but couldn’t then.
In both books, the truth is told from various viewpoints, and the reader is charged with exploring his or her own heart for what is true. Is the carpenter Jesus? Is the schoolteacher innocent? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What is true?
We watch political debates, with both sides telling their truth — and it clashes. Whom do we believe? You’re a little girl, and you’ve been raped — over and over — in your own home by someone charged with taking care of you, and you are told it is a secret, that he loves you, and no one must know about this. What is the truth?
This is why I think Jodi is so cool. She lays it all out there. And the reader absorbs Jodi’s bold story, and thinks “this is so wrong, no, wait, this is so wrong, wait, who is right?”
Jodi is a happy, intelligent married woman with three kids — who, I heard Christina Katz once say “is the only author I know of who had a happy childhood.” But Jodi can rip it all open for the rest of us. She is not faint of heart. She gets her subjects out there so we can all discuss it, and those of us who are transcending the trauma we experienced, perhaps similar to her characters, finally have company, finally have our secrets exposed for others to comment on, to point at and say “that is so wrong.”
And we do know what is true.
