A book review of Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult.
Small Great Things is about racism. I was about to type ‘racism in America’, but that would incorrect. It’s a book about racism; set in America. Racism has no boundaries.
It is an interesting book, a thought provoking book and an important book.
Ruth is a paediatric nurse; a good one; a black one. A white supremacist couple come in to have their first child, see Ruth and demand that she be excluded from caring for the mother or their child. The new-born baby dies during a routine procedure that Ruth, because of a staff shortage, has no choice but to be involved in. Ruth is blamed, and arrested.
Overall, I enjoyed it. It’s nicely written with some sharp images and a nice flow to it. The courtroom scene is well done and feels realistic. The dialogue is good, although some of the white middle-class happy-family stuff gets a bit gooey at times. And there’s a nice twist at the end.
However; Jodie has wanted, I think, to send a message in the final scenes. That message has skewed the plot away from credibility.
The job of fiction is not to teach; it is primarily to entertain. Writers of fiction should not be moralists. A story should have a theme, a message if you like, it increases the resonance of a novel so that it stays in the reader’s mind. But that should never be at the expense of the story. It’s always about the story.
After saying all that, it is still a worthy book, and one that should be read. It has certainly opened my white, closeted, suburban, middle-class eyes to a world that I barely knew existed. A world of blatant, if not intended, racism; of white supremacists; and of the fact that racism can and does work the other way. What I found most disturbing is the ‘respectable’ face that white supremacists, and of many racists in general, show to the world. A white supremacist could just as well be your bank manager, as much a skinhead with love-hate tattooed on their knuckles.
There is a very clever scene where Ruth, a middle-aged black mother, takes her lawyer, a middle-aged white mother, to the supermarket. As they leave they are stopped to have their bags checked. The white-woman’s bags weren’t.
The novel also shows that racism isn’t something that we are born with. Children aren’t bigots; they are misled by ignorant parents. There is a scene in which a white toddler and a black toddler are playing together in a sandpit. The mother of the lawyer, a white women who was raised in one of the southern states of America, points out that when she was a child that wouldn’t have happened, they would have been segregated. She was making a point about how far U.S. society has come. In contrast there is also a scene of teenagers, at a white supremacist gathering, using posters of black men for shooting practice.
Jodi has written 24 books. That’s pretty impressive for someone only 54. The only other of hers I’ve read is The Pact, a story of a teen suicide. It’s a better book than Small Great Things. The story holds together better, I think the writing’s slicker and it’s very, very sad.
However, considering that she’s written 22 books that I haven’t read, I don’t feel in much of a position to say whether either of these are better or worse, or even illustrative of the rest of her collection.
In summary, I’ve enjoyed the two of hers that I have read, but not enough to dive into another.
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