On the day before classes were supposed to start, Mama took me out to dinner. “You're destined to do small great things,” she told me. “Just like Dr. King said.” She was referring to one of her favorite quotes: If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.
To begin, the barest of plot synopsis: The white supremacist parents of a newborn son insist that no African-Americans in the hospital be permitted to touch their baby, and when a black nurse finds herself alone with the boy as he goes into distress, she must decide whether the instructions from her supervisor to respect the parents wishes or her nurse's Nightingale Oath should take precedence. When complications arise and a lawsuit ensues, the upper-middle class white public defender who takes on the nurse's case is forced to confront her own unacknowledged privilege as a form of passive racism.
I had never read a Jodi Picoult novel before (I was turned off when my daughters [young teens at the time] complained to me how manipulatively melodramatic they found the movie My Sister's Keeper to be), but Small Great Things is a book club pick and I wasn't unhappy to see what the massively popular Picoult is like for myself. Upon finishing what I ultimately found to be a manipulatively melodramatic, not to mention cheesy and predictable, book, I am put in mind of two stories: A coworker happened to be talking about Jodi Picoult and she mentioned that she (who has three children on the Autism Spectrum) once read a Picoult book about a family dealing with an autistic child, and she said to me, “I shook my head the whole time, recognising that this couldn't have been written by someone who has actually lived with autism. It was all regurgitated research, no insight.” My second story: Many years ago, I was reading a book, and when my mother-in-law asked what it was about, I replied, “The relocation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during WWII. It's really good.” She told me that she had read a similar novel by Danielle Steel, and that I'd probably like that even better. I snobbishly replied that since my book was written by a descendant of Japanese-Americans who had actually been interred, it's probably more authentic. And my MIL replied, “Yes, but my book was written by Danielle Steel.” So to my point: Small Great Things is a broad examination of race relations in America, and despite the story rotating through three points-of-view (the racist father, the do-gooder lawyer, and the accused nurse), the nurse, Ruth, feels like the main character; and this really did not feel like Picoult's story to tell. On the other hand, as with my mother-in-law appreciating the history that she gets from Danielle Steel novels, I can see how having a massively popular author take up an important social issue can move a necessary conversation forward. And my main point, I suppose: If I thought this book was better written, I probably wouldn't be questioning if Picoult had left her lane on this one; it's all regurgitated research, no insight.
An ironic aside to myself: Not only does Ruth dismiss a white coworker's assessment of her situation (“I want to ask Corinne when she was last Black, because then and only then would she have the right”), but the lawyer, Kennedy, tries to school one of her coworkers on why a white man submitting poetry to literary magazines under a Japanese pseudonym is wrong, “Because it's a lie. He's a white insurance adjuster who co-opted someone else's culture so he could get fifteen minutes of fame.” Meaning, Picoult understands why this might not be her story to tell, but with admittedly good intentions, she plowed ahead anyway. Of the three POVs, I only believed in the authenticity of the lawyer's (the white supremacists don't really deserve nuance, but when they're not being monstrously evil, Picoult tries to insert some background motivations), and I couldn't help but think how much better I would have liked this book if it had been solely from Kennedy's (which is Picoult's own) perspective; Ruth still could have had her speeches:
Did you ever think our misfortune is directly related to your good fortune? Maybe the house your parents bought was on the market because the sellers didn't want my mama in the neighborhood. Maybe the good grades that eventually led you to law school were possible because your mama didn't have to work eighteen hours a day, and was there to read to you at night, or make sure you did your homework. How often do you remind yourself how lucky you are that you own your house, because you were able to build up equity through generations in a way families of color can't? How often do you open your mouth at work and think how awesome it is that no one's thinking you're speaking for everyone with the same skin color you have? How hard is it for you to find the greeting card for your baby's birthday with a picture of a child that has the same color skin as her? How many times have you seen a painting of Jesus that looks like you? Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it.Even so, there would still have been some over-the-top sentences that jolted me out of the story:
She falters, then gather up the weeds of her thoughts and offers me the saddest, truest bouquet.Small Great Things is stuffed with stereotypes, straw men, and manufactured melodrama: this is not my type of book. And yet, I acknowledge all of the reviews from people who were deeply affected by Ruth's plight: readers who were forced to confront their own privilege and passive racism, and that's a good thing, right? I was recently sent an ARC of Picoult's next novel (A Spark of Light), and I don't think I'll read it; but I am looking forward to book club.
