Jodi Picoult is one of those novelists who very precariously, and purposely, straddles the line between literature and genre fiction. Her plots are very contemporary, often ripped from the headlines, always controversial. It would be tempting for a writer with this material to sensationalize in her books, and in so doing rob the characters of nuance and the story of resonance. Picoult, to her credit, avoids this fate. She manages to bring just enough craft to keep her plots from becoming salacious. Unfortunately, not all of her techniques serve the reader as well as they might.
Nineteen Minutes is the story of a school shooting. The basic skeleton of the plot isn't anything new: awkward high school kid is bullied throughout his adolescence, then one day fights back by opening fire on his classmates and teachers. Nineteen minutes later, ten are dead. Complications, naturally, ensue. The superior court judge who will hear the case, Alex Cormier, has a daughter, Josie, who witnessed the shooting, and whose boyfriend was killed. This same judge had her daughter delivered seventeen years ago by a midwife, Lacy Houghton who happens to be the mother of the shooter, Peter. These two have been estranged for a decade or so because Alex caught Peter showing Josie how to use - wait for it - a gun when they were small. Drama!!
Fortunately for the reader, the drama does not degenerate into melodrama. Picoult knows enough to characterize the people in her story in small, poignant scenes. Most of the gravitas in the book is found in quiet moments where one character is by himself, or two characters say a few words to each other. Even the courtroom section is not overdone, and all those involved in the legal proceedings are given the opportunity to be real people in other parts of the book.
All that being said, this is by no means a perfect novel. While Picoult's characters resemble real people, they also resemble clueless people. It's very frustrating to watch Alex fumble her relationship with her daughter and seem shocked that a competent, professional woman such as herself could be such a failure as a parent. Peter's father is a professor who studies the economy of happiness. Dramatic irony! How could the guy who studies how people get happy POSSIBLY father a child who is so tragically UNhappy? These characters might have had more weight if they hadn't spent so much of the book walking around staring at their surroundings in awe, wondering why the world didn't work the way they thought it did. It's true that every character has moments where things get turned upside down, but most people have a little bit more humility than this.
There are exceptions, of course. Picoult's teenage characters were actually very believable. Josie, in particular, could have easily become a stock popular-girl-who-is-actually-scared-of-becoming-unpopular, but her relationship with Peter and her attempts to individualize herself ring true. Peter himself is very sympathetic, and I felt for him more than the victims of the shooting throughout most of the story. This is an achievement on Picoult's part, because it would have been easy to overplay her hand in trying to make the reader feel for Peter, and she doesn't. Near the end, there's quite a shocking confession that alleviates at least some of Peter's guilt. His lawyer asks why he never told the truth about this particular part before, since it could have made things a little easier on him. When he gives his answer, I completely believe him. The one adult character I felt was real was Lacy, Peter's mother. Picoult is a master in the scenes where Lacy is alone and where she's talking to Peter and to her husband. She doesn't hold back from forcing Lacy to ask the hard questions about why this happened and who is at fault. In one scene, Lacy and her husband, Lewis, go to the graveyard to visit the victims:
" 'We did the best we could,' Lacy said.
'It wasn't good enough.' Lewis jerked his head in the direction of the graves. 'Look at this. Look at this.'
Lacy did. Through the driving downpour, with her hair and clothes plastered to her, she took stock of the graveyard and saw the faces of the children who would still be alive, if her own son had never been born.
Lacy put her hand over her abdomen. The pain cut her in half, like a magician's trick, except she knew she would never really be put back together.
One of her sons had been doing drugs. The other was a murderer. Had she and Lewis been the wrong parents for the boys they'd had? Or should they never have been parents at all?"
It's hard to ignore the pain that weighs this scene down. I couldn't read it without asking myself the same questions. I'm not a parent, but that makes me no less capable of producing a child who could commit these acts. Picoult allows for quite a bit of dysfunction in Peter's family that makes him a likely candidate to have committed this crime, but overall the family is really normal. I think that's part of the message: "It was simple to say that behind every terrible child stood a terrible parent, but what about the ones who had done the best they could? What about the ones, like Lacy, who had loved unconditionally, protected ferociously, cherished mightily - and still raised a murderer?"
The other thing I found very frustrating was Picoult's narrative device. She uses a third-person omniscient narrator, and skips frequently from character to character. This might work, and it helps her cause to get inside more than one characters head, but she can't stop herself from addressing the reader directly far too often. It really breaks the momentum of the narration to suddenly see the word "you." Writers have to be very careful about using the second person voice, and most of the time it only works if the narrator is one of the characters. Then it generally acts as an establishment of trust between the character and the reader, and it feels like a conversation. When there are so many characters, though, the "you" seems inappropriate and forced. There is no trust relationship between you and the narrator since the narrator is not identified, and so after a while I began to resent being told what I thought or how I felt. Case in point: "Alex had been rattled by her own emotions during the arraignment; instead of telling herself she was being ridiculous, she'd acted on them. But this was exactly what happened, wasn't it, when you started to sift thorough the shifting sands of feelings, instead of just feeding facts hand over fist? The hell with putting your heart on your sleeve; it was likely to get ripped off." Well, no. Nothing's happening to my heart. I'm not learning this lesson, Alex is, and I think it's lazy for Picoult to resort to these kinds of narrative gymnastics.
All told, despite the imperfections, this is a solid read. It moves quickly, as Picoult's books always do, and it forces the reader to think about difficult things. She attacks her controversial topics with gusto and does a good job opening up all the angles to the reader. If you've never read her before, though, I recommend the far superior My Sister's Keeper. The subject matter is much more intriguing, and the ending more surprising.
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