Small Great Things
By Jodi Picoult, Ballantine Books, 480 pages, $29
In a very earnest author’s note at the end of her latest novel, “Small Great Things”, Jodi Picoult says that she has long wanted to write about American racism. Picoult is savvy enough to make her position as “white and class-privileged” known from the start. She details the rigorous research she did, the people she talked to, including women of colour and skinheads. Of the former, she said: “I hoped to invite these women into a process, and in return they gave me a gift: they shared their experiences of what it really feels like to be black.”
There is also a lot of introspection about her presumed audience (white people) and her own racism. She ends the note acknowledging that talking about racism is difficult but that “we who are white need to have this discussion among ourselves. Because then, even more of us will overhear and — I hope — the conversation will spread.”
Picoult certainly seems to have the best of intentions. The question is whether good intentions translate into a good novel. “Small Great Things” is, in most ways, a classic Jodi Picoult novel — tackling contemporary social issues, creating interesting, relatable characters and presenting a gripping courtroom drama.
Ruth Jefferson, a black woman with a teenage son, has been a labour and delivery nurse for more than 20 years when the white supremacists Turk and Brittany Bauer come to her maternity ward for the delivery of Brittany’s first child, a boy named Davis. Turk demands that Ruth have no interaction with the baby — but when the ward is short-handed, Ruth finds herself alone with Davis just as he stops breathing. In that moment, Ruth has to decide whether she should heed her humanity and her oath as a nurse or follow the orders she has received to stay away from the Bauer baby.
In the end, Ruth does both, but cannot prevent serious consequences. The parents, as you might expect, need someone to blame. In short order, Ruth’s nursing licence is suspended. She is charged with felony crimes, and her fate lies in the hands of the public defender Kennedy McQuarrie, a white woman.
Picoult knows how to tell an interesting story, and the novel moves briskly. This is a writer who understands her characters inside and out. She knows her story equally well. In terms of research, Picoult has put in the work — even too much work at times, as if she is saying, “Look at everything I know about everything I’m writing here.” Still, this preparation and eagerness to please don’t really detract. I’d rather read a writer who knows too much about the story she is telling than a writer who knows not enough.
“Small Great Things” particularly shines when Picoult writes from Turk Bauer’s point of view. She makes this man with loathsome ideologies flawed but human. He is a white supremacist, but he is also a husband and father. We see his anger and impotence, and as the story unfolds, we see how he learnt to hate, how he met and fell in love with Brittany, how avenging his son becomes his singular motivation. At times, Turk’s story feels like a history of the modern white supremacy movement, but given the current political climate it is quite prescient and worthwhile.
Then there is Kennedy, Ruth’s public defender, married to a surgeon who (of course) seems to be the perfect man. They have one child, a daughter who is (of course) adorable and precocious. Kennedy is harried, but (of course) a loving and well-loved wife and mother. By the end of the novel, she becomes a proxy for well-meaning white folk who don’t realise the extent of their racism until they are forced to confront it. Kennedy’s evolution quickly becomes too contrived and convenient. There is even a moment in her closing arguments during which Kennedy says: “When I started working on this case, ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t see myself as a racist. Now I realise I am.” Girl, I guess.
When it comes to race itself, the novel stumbles. Its least believable character is Ruth. Her blackness is clinical, overarticulated. I certainly appreciate the research Picoult did and the conversations she had, but research does not necessarily translate to authenticity.
Ruth and her sister, Adisa, were raised in Harlem by a single mother who works as a maid for a wealthy white family. Ruth is light-skinned and Adisa darker. (Nee Rachel, Adisa had an awakening in her 20s and changed her name to get in touch with her African roots.) Now Adisa is the militant one while Ruth is more open to integration. The more we see of Ruth and her family, the more their characterisation feels like black-people bingo — as if Picoult is working through a checklist of issues in an attempt to say everything about race in one book. Colourism, professional discrimination, segregation, the challenges of black ambition, microaggressions, the welfare system, negotiating predominantly white spaces, the boundaries of authentic blackness and, of course, race and the justice system: Bingo!
There are references to Trayvon Martin’s killing and the tennis player James Blake’s mistaken arrest (though Blake, inexplicably, becomes “Malik Thaddon”). There is a stand-in for Al Sharpton, one Wallace Mercy: “His wild white hair stands on end, like he’s been electrocuted. His fist is raised in solidarity with whatever apparent injustice he’s currently championing.” Bingo!
It all starts to feel excessive and desperately didactic. This rises, I suspect, out of Picoult’s keen awareness that she is writing mostly for a white audience, which needs a more nuanced understanding of the black experience. And therein lies the true challenge of writing across difference, or of writing a political novel — if the politics overcomes the prose, then it becomes something other than a novel.
During Ruth’s trial, it’s clear that the courtroom is where Picoult feels most comfortable. We are treated to pages and pages of legal discovery and testimony. At times, it starts to feel like reading court transcripts — but to be fair, they are very interesting court transcripts. Turk and Brittany Bauer show up, and Brittany, racked with grief, makes the occasional outburst from the gallery. Ruth’s son starts to struggle with his mother’s precarious position and the revelations of the trial. There are more legal manoeuvres. And then there is the ending, with a twist that is so unexpected and so over-the-top that it undermines what is, on the whole, a compelling and well-intended novel.
Truly, the twist still has me shaking my head because I understand the why of it while recognising that Picoult has crossed a bridge too far. From there, the ending is breathlessly rushed, with revelations, resolutions and epiphanies.
It is, in the end, the author’s note that leaves me feeling generous towards “Small Great Things” despite its shortcomings. Picoult wanted to write about race in contemporary America, and she does. The novel is messy, but so is our racial climate. I give Picoult a lot of credit for trying, and for supporting her attempt with rigorous research, good intentions and an awareness of her fallibility. Picoult’s flawed novel will most likely be well received by her intended audience. I trust that the next time she writes about race — and I do hope there is a next time — she’ll write about it in ways that will also be compelling for the rest of us.
–New York Times News Service
Roxane Gay’s new story collection, “Difficult Women”, will be published in this month.
