Twenty-five years into her writing career, and with a book for nearly every one of them, Jodi Picoult has finally seen the fruition of an idea that she had at the beginning. That long gestation period is an interesting corrective to those who might marvel at the timeliness of “Small Great Things”, published in November, and the startling mirror its storyline of racism and prejudice holds up to the turbulence of present-day politics. In fact, as Picoult points out: “I would argue that any time in the past 200 years in America this has been timely. What’s so shocking, honestly, is that right now, a lot of white people in my country are being horrified by something that people of colour knew has been there all along.”
I meet Picoult on her whistlestop visit to the UK, less than two weeks after the American election. She was in Australia when Donald Trump was elected, and likens the aftermath of grief and shock she felt to processing a death; she would wake up every morning, turn to CNN or the “New York Times” to find the news from the States, “stunned anew” each time by the “fresh hell Trump waded into”. Since he was elected, she notes, there has been a rise in hate crimes and speech: “Elementary school kids chanting at Latino students ‘We’re going to build a wall’; Muslim American families waking up with signs on their lawn, saying ‘Get out now’; swastikas painted on a children’s playground in New York City; we’re seeing all this and we’re not seeing an abject disavowal by the president-elect, which is a very big problem. Instead what we’re seeing are cabinet picks that support this kind of behaviour. That’s terrifying.”
And it also goes straight to the heart of one of the major themes of “Small Great Things”: the ingrained prejudice in the political and social status quo that can rapidly mutate into an explosive, uncontrollable and damaging situation. That’s what happened 25 years ago, when an African American undercover cop was shot four times in the back by his white colleagues in New York City; appalled by the story, Picoult decided she wanted to build a novel around it. So she tried, “and I failed miserably. I could not seem to create voices that were authentic, characters that were authentic, situations that were authentic, and eventually I put the book aside and I really questioned whether I, a white woman who grew up with privilege, had the right to tell anyone of colour what their lives are like. Was that really my story to tell?”
But the urge wouldn’t go away — and neither would the inner devil’s advocate that asked her why this story was different from any of the others she wrote; after all, she reasoned, she wasn’t a Holocaust survivor or a school shooter either. “And of course the answer is racism. It’s really hard to talk about without offending people, and so as a result, many of us choose not to talk about it at all.” But sometimes the answer is simply to wait.
In 2012, Picoult came across the story of an experienced labour and delivery nurse in Flint, Michigan, who sued the hospital she worked for after a baby’s father demanded that neither she nor anyone who looked like her — the nurse was black — should touch his child. The hospital acquiesced, and put a note to that effect on the baby’s file.
Eventually, the nurse settled out of court and, says Picoult, “I hope she got a giant payout. But it really made me think, again, what if this was the centre of a novel, and what if I could push the envelope? What if that nurse was the only one alone with the baby when something went wrong, and she had to choose between following her supervisor’s orders, or saving a baby’s life? What if as a result of that she wound up on trial, defended by a white attorney, a public defender who, like me, like a lot of my friends, would never consider herself to be a racist? What if I could tell the story in three points of view — the nurse, the public defender and the white supremacist dad, as they all began to unravel their beliefs about power and privilege and race? And suddenly, it was like something clicked, and I said, ‘Oh: I’m going to finish this one’.”
And she did, weaving all sorts of other elements into the story of her protagonist, Ruth Jefferson, a model citizen who has worked hard to build her career, to survive the death of her US army husband, killed by an IED in Afghanistan, and to bring up their son, Edison, in a small house in an affluent and largely white suburb in Connecticut. She trod a very different path to her sister, who changed her name from Rachel to the Yoruba name Adisa, lives in a crime-filled neighbourhood, and has five children and a minimum wage job; sometimes, Ruth wonders whether the fact that her skin is a lighter shade than her sister’s has affected the course of their lives. And yet, as Picoult points out, Adisa has tuned in to the reality of their lives as women of colour in a way that Ruth hasn’t; rather the nurse “has believed very much that she can fly under the radar of white society and nobody would ever notice that she was there. And, of course, Adisa would be the first to tell her, uh-huh, you just wait. And I love that Adisa is the one there to pick up the pieces when Ruth falls.”
Ruth’s adversary, Turk Bauer, is a similarly complex creation: a man who has been drawn into the neo-Nazi orbit by the potent combination of an unhappy upbringing and the far right’s seductive recruitment techniques. As part of her research, Picoult sought out former white supremacists: Tim Zaal, who in the 1980s beat up a gay man and left him for dead, but later forged a relationship with him and now joins him in giving talks about their experience; and Frank Meeink, who once led a violent gang in Philadelphia but now helps the FBI ferret out racists online. “These are people who have completely changed their worldview,” explains Picoult. “And I really left those experiences thinking: OK, if these two guys could have a change of heart, doesn’t it stand to reason that the average white person could make a few changes for the better?”
If that makes her sound like a modern-day Pollyanna, it shouldn’t; and her mailbag and Twitter feed are enough to let her know that not everyone agrees with her. She writes back to all her correspondents, and often ends up giving what she calls “private social justice tutorials”, in which she counters complaints about reverse racism with straightforward rebuttals and exhortations to listen. What she really hopes for “Small Great Things”, she says, “is that it’s not just preaching to the choir, that it’s getting into the hands of people who perhaps have not put themselves in the shoes of those who were not born with white skin, and who are tapping into that great schism, that divide, and that empathy that they need to find to realise that their lives really have been different from people of colour in the United States; and that they will never face the micro-aggressions that people of colour face on a daily basis”.
Picoult has frequently written about challenging subjects, including euthanasia, autism and the death penalty, but this is striking territory for a commercial writer: when her UK publishers sent out proofs of this book, they did so without her name or a title attached, and with the tagline #readwithoutprejudice. It was a clever bit of marketing, but it also spoke to the assumptions we make about the areas commercial fiction can and can’t go into. She laughs when I point out that a book with the same themes would be discussed in different terms if it had been written by, say, Jonathan Franzen, and recalls that Franzen has publicly aired his views on the difficulty of writing about race as a white person and his reluctance to do so. “That’s something else we don’t have in common,” she says, and wryly adds that she suspects his books would be received rather differently if he were called Jennifer rather than Jonathan. Does that bother her?
“I chose to be a commercial author because I knew I was going to write the same kind of book, the same quality of writing, no matter what I wrote, and I wanted to reach more people,” she replies. “What is the caveat to that? Well, I’m never going to win the Nobel prize for literature, not going to win a National Book award, never even going to be nominated. What you trade for that is sales and readership. And I would rather reach more people. It would be very nice to not be unfairly accused of being a bad writer, but hopefully if you do pick up one of my books, you will be quickly disabused of that notion.”
Given the reach of her work, it is unlikely that all her readers will share her views; inevitably, I point out, many of them will be Trump supporters. “I hope so,” she says. “I really hope so. Because it’s not the people who voted for Clinton who necessarily need this book. It is the Trump supporters who need it. And here’s the deal. Am I going to change all those Trump supporters? Absolutely not. There are people you just cannot reach ... They are not ready to take a step on to this path. It’s not going to happen. But there are people whose minds will change. Who will read this and see themselves in a new light. Who will read this and maybe think twice about what they have been told, and what they have believed in. That is critically important. If you can even change one mind, it’s worth writing the book.”
Picoult turned 50 this year; her three children are now adults (she has co-authored two young adult novels with her daughter, Samantha van Leer). There are 40 million of her books in print. She could afford to slow down a little. But a day off is rare; usually she’ll just start working, after her daily run or long walk. Her ideal downtime would be baking, or curled up in front of the fire on a snowy day, reading a good book, all four of her dogs piled on top of her.
But you sense there are many more books to come; and contemporary America is certainly giving her plenty of ideas. The day before our conversation, Trump issued his condemnatory series of tweets about the cast of the musical “Hamilton”. Does she worry about the future of freedom of speech and expression? She replies that America’s constitution makes it extremely hard to overturn an amendment — look, for example, at how long it took women to gain the vote. Nobody, she thinks, is about to take away freedom of speech. “So I don’t fear for that very much. I do fear for the police state that might imprison you if you do speak out. But that said, artists, actors, playwrights, novelists, have always been the ones to speak out and to challenge. Isn’t that the whole point of art? I don’t think I know of any writer or artist who’s backing down from this challenge. I think if anything we see it as a call to arms.”
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
