There’s an interesting profile of author Jodi Picoult in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine — albeit one focused more on the type of books she writes than on the author herself, and one in which Picoult emerges as sometimes almost strangely non-present even when the focus of the piece switches back to the biographical:
Asked at the time to recall her adolescence, she found herself agreeing with the idea that the things we remember from those years are often the most vivid occasions of melancholy and humiliation. Picoult can summon up the memory of having her fingers smashed into a locker by a hallway bully but little else of her younger life in any great detail, she told me.
It must be said, I have never read any of Picoult’s books, and I was only vaguely familiar with her name before I saw the trailer for My Sister’s Keeper. But, as the Times notes, she “has found enormous commercial success as the most visible and dedicated practitioner of a subcategory of contemporary genre fiction that might best be described as the literature of children in peril.”
Or, as Michael Schaub of Bookslut puts it, “Jodi Picoult wants you to know your child is probably dying right now.”
From the trailer for the film, and my basic understanding of the plot — “Anna Fitzgerald looks to earn medical emancipation from her parents who until now have relied on their youngest child to help their leukemia-stricken daughter Kate remain alive,” says the IMDB — that definitely seems to be the case. More than anything, the basic story seems to force one into taking an ethical stand on something that is unlikely and contrived, spelled out in what the Times calls “tidy ironies and florid prose.” Well yes, I do think raising a daughter solely as donor stock for her older, cancer-stricken sibling is probably a bad thing. Morally dubious at the least. So thank you for telling that me I’m right in thinking so. If anything like that should ever actually, you know, happen, I’ll be sure to know that it’s a very bad thing.
However, as the Times points out, “[w]hile Picoult’s notion of what constitutes domestic incident may stretch ideas of plausibility, it rests on a level of forensic detail that requires wide-ranging research.”
Which makes me wonder: if the story wasn’t set in the real world, would its being unrealistic bug me? If Picoult’s novels were, that is, science fiction, would suspension of disbelief take me the distance I need to go in order not to smirk at their implausibility? Isn’t this the “what if?” we expect, or even demand, from genre fiction — this extrapolation of real-world ideas and research that takes us beyond the possible and to the extremes, in order to see just where those extremes lie? Science fiction is by no means exempt from the requirements of believability, but there’s a big difference between asking readers to imagine a “what if” scenario (and the ethical quandries such a scenario implies) and asking them to believe that it does exist, in the here and now, and ooh, isn’t that scary?
And yet Picoult isn’t envisioning a near future in which genetic planning is commonplace; she isn’t writing science fiction. As the Times notes:
Tellingly, Picoult does not see herself as a genre writer but rather as a purveyor of social commentary (as if the categories were mutually exclusive) and of what we might call service fiction. “Maybe the average reader is not facing the daily challenges of a mom whose child is dying of cancer, for example, but she probably had an argument with her teenager that morning about something inconsequential that left her feeling frustrated and certain there’s no middle ground between them,†she told me. Picoult said she hoped in some sense that her books were the way to that middle ground.
We shall see. I don’t expect to run out and read the book anytime soon, but it does look like I’ll be dragged into seeing the movie this weekend. Neither looks especially bad — despite some pretty mixed reviews of the book and the Times‘ warning that the ending is “so insistent in its shock value that it may inspire the reader to deposit the book under the wheels of a minivan.” — but clearly I have some reservations.