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Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Picoult-a-thon: Day 1, pages 1-76ish
I had forgotten how quickly seventy-six pages of a novel goes. THAT IS SO SAD. Realizing that I can have forgotten anything about the 100% pure awesome that is losing myself in a good book almost makes me question my priorities and toss this whole 'further education' bit out the window.
OK, not really.
I digress. For those just joining us, my friend Katie and I are liveblogging (except not exactly, you know, live) Jodi Picoult's House Rules. Full explanation is here. And now, on to the snark:
There's really not much. This is a pretty decent book and the things I don't like about it aren't snarkable things, or maybe I'm not in a snarky mood, but here goes:
- The most glaring issue for me so far (full disclosure: I'm a few pages into the second 76-page section, and it gets better) is that Jacob's voice (remember he's the boy with Asperger's) just doesn't ring true in his first-person sections. For a person who's so literal -- and people with Aspergers definitely tend to be literal -- his thoughts contain an awful lot of metaphors and idioms. It felt much, much more like someone else explaining Jacob's thoughts -- which of course it is -- and it took me out of the story a bit.
- Also: Like any novel that has a complicated medical or psychological issue at its center, the narration tends to be a bit infodumpy and advocate-ish. Some of the text reads like a Good Housekeeping article rather than a page-turner of a novel by a bestselling author. It's kind of unavoidable, I know, when the author has to introduce her readers to An Issue while simultaneously showing how her characters' lives are affected by it, but there it is. I noticed the same thing about Picoult's previous novel, Handle With Care (which got thrown across the room at the end. Hey, guys, this could get exciting here).
Interesting note: the mother (Emma) is an advice columnist. This is a good job for someone in a novel, I think. I remember liking it when I read a kidlit book (was it called Dear Lola?) about a parentless family whose oldest brother keeps the family in food and lodging by writing an advice column, way back when I actually was a kid (the fact that I'm not one now certainly doesn't keep me from reading kidlit, although college unfortunately does). And then there was a recent Jacqueline Mitchard novel, The Breakdown Lane, about an advice columnist whose teenage son takes over her column when she develops MS. (I really enjoyed this book, but unfortunately I've just told you almost everything I can remember about it. Getting old is sad.)
If Jacob at some point takes over his mother's column, though, I will be quite surprised.
Also: I totally called the crime scene diagnosis before Jacob did. Unfortunately, this is because it made the news a year or two ago when a man died in a similar way not far from here.
Theo (younger, neurotypical brother) is developing into quite a creepy, disturbed character. Not your average sullen overlooked teen, he feels compelled to break into people's houses and handle their stuff when they're not home. Which -- oh -- brings me to one other thing I didn't like: thanks to contextual clues, it's pretty obvious to a reader with brains that he does this because he wants to feel like he's in a normal family and a normal home. Yet Picoult has to tell us that, during one of Theo's first-person sections, instead of letting us figure it out for ourselves. Now I don't go into a Jodi Picoult novel expecting, say, the finesse and subtlety of Kazuo Ishiguro, but give me a little credit for having a brain, please? It reminds me of the film version of The Music Man (which, by the way, I mostly utterly adore), during "Pickalittle Talkalittle": we see the matronly women in their feathered hats standing around gossiping, behaving like busybody hens, even singing in a chickenlike way, and then just to be sure and also to insult the audience's intelligence, the camera cuts to some convenient hens pecking at the ground nearby. HEY AUDIENCE! DID YOU NOTICE THEY ARE BEHAVING KIND OF LIKE HENS? Graah. Don't show us the chickens, writers.
And now I will close with my new prediction regarding the PPCSTE (that's Picoult-Patented Cheap-Shot Twist Ending, of course):
I'm still leaning toward Jacob as the guilty party, and it will have something to do with Emma's family's House Rule Number 5, which states, "Take care of your brother; he's the only one you've got." (hence the title, see?)
