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Monday, March 08, 2010
Picoult-a-thon: The End
I will try to mark spoilers and make them easy to skip if you want to. I was going to go all 2002 high-tech and make the text color match the background color so that you'd have to highlight to read them, but then I remember about how RSS readers sometimes strip formatting, so I won't. Silly technology. Fix yourself!
So. I'm done with the book. Along with my thoughts about this ending in particular, I want to talk a little bit about twist ending in general. I've often called Picoult's endings such things as "cheap shots" and "ripoffs" and "contrived", and I've reached the point where sometimes when I'm reading one of her books, I read the ending first so that it doesn't infuriate me when I get to it. Obviously that wasn't an option for this project, which turned out to be a good thing, and here's why:
So this leads me to believe that there are two or three different kinds of Picoult endings:
- Books where the endings might seem contrived but aren't if you pay attention; see above.
- Books where the endings truly are contrived and truly are a rip-off -- My Sister's Keeper, for example, and Handle With Care -- books where the ending is a total departure from the rest of the story, books that remind me of that one short story I wrote for tenth-grade English where this guy had AIDS* and I got twelve pages into what was supposed to be a seven-to-fourteen-page story about his friendship with a girl before I realized there was no way I could write it the way I'd originally intended to do in the allotted space remaining so I killed the guy off in a car accident and called it a twist ending. My English teacher was suitably unimpressed, and I know how he feels because that's exactly how I feel at the end of a book where the ending seems to be just thrown in to make a splash (or cut the story shorter) but makes no point otherwise. *If you'd been fifteen in 1990 with an overly inflated perception of your own writing ability, chances are you'd have written an AIDS story too. Trust me on this.
- Books whose endings may or may not Play Fair, but they at least make you think about the book, and maybe even a major life issue, in a different light. I'm thinking about Tenth Circle and Plain Truth, two of my favorite Picoults (after Nineteen Minutes). It might be a bit of a cheap shot -- or it might not, and I'll never know because I can't wipe that part of my memory and reread the book to find out -- but at least it's a cheap shot with a point. (You might argue that the end of Handle With Care qualifies here too, but I would argue back.)
In sum: this wasn't a perfect book. The writing was a bit wobbly in the Jacob sections, as Katie and I both noted, and there were a couple of grating factual difficulties. But overall, I enjoyed it and can recommend it.
Katie, thank you for doing this project with me. I know we're both busy people, but I had a lot of fun. (Yes, I have homework and kids, but you have a full-time job, so I think it all evens out. And I only had to stay up till 1:30 once this weekend to catch up on my trig homework. :) )
