I've been wondering about Jodi Picoult lately. Probably because advertisements for her new book (and recent re-releases of her back list all with spanking-new matching covers) have been assaulting me everywhere I go. In the metro station. On the side of a bus. In every magazine I flip open. In large display windows of chain bookstores. So many Picoult messages were pressing down upon me, toward me, that I found myself thinking about her career. Her many books (I've not read a single one), her wholesale dismissal by the (self-described?) literati, her crazy success in Britain.
So it was with amazement and quite a bit of much-needed relief from the day's awful events that I gladly gave myself over to The Observer's Sunday piece on Picoult. It seems that Louise France has been quietly reading my mind. She poses some of the same questions I've posed myself: why has Picoult been marginalized if not wholly ignored by the Kakutanis of the world and how, having fallen into the no-man's-land between critical success and the other end of the spectrum (that end including the Dan Brown thrillers & chick-lit when-will-i be-married-tomes), has she managed to sell so many books? She is neither literary nor wholly genre. Not quite light and fluffy, not quite weighty enough for the stuff of literature. Yet - she's frequently at the top of many best seller lists.
So, bravo to France for traveling to New Hampshire and asking what I wanted to know. The answers, I'm sad to say, are less illuminating. I do feel, though, that just by putting the questions out there and having Picoult consider them honestly is something in itself. The piece covers Picoult's career -- her fourteen books (the 15th at the galley stage, the 16th in a pile of notes on her desk) -- and pins the lack of critical success on the topics Picoult chooses for each novel:
"Picoult has a formula: choose a subject which is soon to become controversial and tell the story through a rotating cast of characters. Stem cell research, date rape, domestic violence, sexual abuse, teenage suicide - here are some of the knottiest moral issues of our times sandwiched between the soft-focus covers of what is commonly dismissed as an airport novel.
Carolyn Mays is the fiction editor at Hodder & Stoughton who signed Jodi Picoult in Britain four years ago for, she says, 'not very much money'. At first she wondered if she'd made a mistake. 'I loved her stories but I thought I'd have to hand-sell every copy,' she remembers. 'I used to say to the book trade: "I know you don't think you want to read a book about a child dying of leukaemia ... but believe me, you do."
Ah-hah! The "formula" is probably where she has gone astray. Possibly. Maybe. I hate formulaic stuff and I'm pretty sure Kakutani hates such machinations too. Or, it could be those covers. You know how I feel about those covers. Yet, the readers keep reading. The books keep selling and Picoult keeps writing.
Aware that I'm walking a precarious line of observation when I've not even read her work, I focused instead on the lovely bits of writerly process Picoult dishes out in the article:
"'Writing,' she says, offering me a slice of home-baked lemon and buttermilk sponge cake, 'is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write. You can always edit something bad. You can't edit something blank. That has always been my mantra.'" (emphasis mine)
Good, eh? So I'm crushing a little on Picoult. Feeling that while I still may not read her work right away, she is certainly a hard-working writer and I have enormous respect for writers who tow the line, who make it happen every single day. Whether I like their work or not (again, had I read it...I know, I'm sounding like so many people that I have berated in this blog) is beside the point. I would do well to setup a similar schedule and write away. Visions of productivity--of towing the line--danced in my head.
And then I got to the bit about her new book, Nineteen Minutes, and everything came crashing down: it's about a high school shooting in a small rural town in New Hampshire. She spent months interviewing survivors of school shootings, including those at Columbine. She'll be on a book tour for the next three months to discuss it. Her author site lists several resources for school violence prevention and it seems this has become a real issue for her - something she feels we haven't adequately addressed as a society. I'll say.
I can't quite figure it: will the next three months be terribly awkward and awful (for both her and her book sales) or will they encourage a proper dialogue about this madness?
