Reading

I don’t often write about books but for once I thought I would.

The great thing about doing a degree in English at university was that it gave me permission to read - because it was “work”. Before that, reading a book instead of doing my homework was laziness. Now it became study.

This happy state of affairs ended when I graduated in 1972. Though it’s often been true since then that I have to read a novel because I'm teaching it, this is never quite as enjoyable. I’m distracted, as I read, by considerations about whether the class will like it/find it too easy/find it too hard/find rude things in it/ find anything that could possibly be construed as racist/fattist/anti-disabled/anti-smokers or any other anti- that could upset anyone.

Other than out of duty, however, I don’t sit around at home reading during term-time all that much, simply because there’s usually something less pleasant that I feel I ought to be doing instead. I do read in bed and in the bath. And I don’t read much fiction – not because I don’t like novels (I like some novels a lot) but because I certainly don’t like all novels and I really enjoy reading diaries and letters and biographies. And blogs.

I’ve now finished “My Sister’s Keeper” and am trying to analyse my feelings about it. In case you don’t know, the main character is a thirteen-year-old girl who was conceived specifically so that she could donate her cord blood to her sister, who has leukaemia. Later, the well sister donates other body products such as bone marrow and at the start of the book, her parents want her to give her sister a kidney. She goes to a lawyer to ask that she, not her parents, should have the right to decide whether she give any further parts of her body. This is the main crisis of the novel.

Of course it’s fiction and of course fiction has to have a plot, a problem, conflict, a dénouement. And of course a plot is artificial, and one wants a structure, with the writer’s hand guiding the plot to a satisfactory – not necessarily a happy – outcome. And this novel has most of these things. But it also seemed to me rather unpleasant: it milks the situation, fluently squeezing agony out of all the characters.

Jodi Picoult uses the device of multiple point of view, so that the girl, her sister, her delinquent brother, both parents, the lawyer, the lawyer’s girlfriend, the lawyer’s girlfriend’s identical twin (why?) each narrate a few chapters. Good heavens - the lawyer, who is epileptic, has a dog (called, with heavy thematic symbolism, Judge) to warn him of oncoming fits. I half-expected this furry character to get a chunk of narrative: (“Why does no one consider my point of view, dragged into court every day? Where are my rights? Woof. Grr.”)

It’s a jolly tricky thing to do, multiple voices, and I’m not saying that I could do it any better. But that’s not really the point. You wouldn’t notice that the narrator changed if you didn’t read the chapter headings. The thirteen-year-old girl writes like a forty-year-old, as does the drug-addicted delinquent brother, who goes around fire-raising because the really nice parents somehow don’t pay him any attention (and the father is a fireman so that makes it really ironic). The ill sister’s voice is identical to the donor-sister’s – in fact they’re all articulate and insightful and very reasonable but all much the same.

And really, does Jodi P have to make all these terrible things happen to one family? Especially what happens at the end? Come on, now. Gah. Yes, she's trying to grasp her readers by the emotions, but also I think it’s because there’s no easy answer to the problem. Should Anna give Kate her kidney? Kate looks like dying anyway; Anna is traumatised by the procedures already undergone and would have to give up her beloved ice hockey in case her remaining kidney got damaged in a game. But how can she let her sister die? It’s an insoluble problem so I suppose lots of distracting sub-plots are the novelist’s way of padding out her story.

I once had a lecturer who objected to EM Forster’s novels because of what he called their “crrrrrrude co-incidences”. This novel has its share too. The sort-of-guardian person appointed to help the girl just happens to be the lawyer’s ex-girlfriend. They both happen never to have found love again even after fifteen or so years, even though they’re both terribly attractive. The fireman father happens to be called out to all the fires started by the son. At the end, the father just happens to come across … well, I’ll not tell you in case you’re about to read the book, but unless he’s a member of the only fire crew, he might well not be called to this event and it’s rather unlikely – at best terrifically bad luck – that this event would happen in the first place.

And the rest of the book – the ever-after – is skimmed over far too fast. Apart from the one bad event, things are fine in the future. The bad brother becomes a police officer! This fits in well with the other unlikelihoods, such as that a thirteen-year-old would consult a lawyer to act for her against her parents; that the lawyer would take on a case for a thirteen-year-old with little cash; or that no one would know he had epilepsy even though he frequently has to plead in court cases. (He drives around, too. Not a good idea.) The parents never seem to have considered that the girl might like to be consulted about her kidneys. Surely they would?

Having said all that – Jodi Picoult sells lots of books and I did read it to the end, at least faintly gripped. Pressed. Nudged, maybe. It deals with a modern moral dilemma which might well cause such problems – if you forget about the subplots with the lawyer and the delinquent-but-with-heart-of-gold brother. But I can’t help feeling that that it would have been a much better novel if – say - Anne Tyler had written it.