[Tasl] Jodi Picoult and the Anxious Parent

[mlgav]

nice article about jodi picoult who wrote "nineteen minutes".

June 21, 2009


Jodi Picoult and the Anxious Parent


By GINIA BELLAFANTE

 


 
    
IN THE NOVELS of Jodi Picoult, terrible
things happen to children of middle-class parentage: they become
terminally ill, or are maimed, gunned down, killed in accidents,
molested, abducted, bullied, traumatized, stirred to violence. The
assault on any individual family is typically mounted from angles
multiple and unforeseen. 
In “My Sister’s Keeper,” the first of Picoult’s 16 novels to be made
into a feature film (it opens this Friday), a couple with a delinquent
teenage son and a daughter who has acute promyelocytic leukemia
conceive a third child to serve as her bone-marrow donor. Multiple
operations on both girls follow over the span of many years, until the
donor child, victim of a sort of abuse that is passing itself off as
godliness, rebels at 13, devastating her mother by initiating legal
proceedings to ensure her own corporeal autonomy. 
Picoult’s storytelling revels in sequential miseries — no singular
unhappiness ever seems sufficient. Various nightmares fuel the plot of
“Nineteen Minutes,” a post-Columbine novel and one of her most popular
books. Here, a midwife and her academic husband are largely blind to
the depths of their son’s isolation — until he shoots close to a dozen
of his classmates — just as they were blind to the drug problems and
viciousness of an older son, who seemed to function so exceptionally.
And yet they appear to be such lovely parents, so well-meaning and
engaged (they read The Economist). 

rest of the article..
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/magazine/21picoult-t.html?_r=1&em

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