Picoult Overreaches and Misses on Genre and Message in House Rules


You have to hand it to Jodi Picoult in House Rules: she writes enough mystery around her characters to leave readers scratching their heads, wondering if they ought to sympathize with and stay with the characters through the entire book, or jump ship early because it seems so obvious where the book is headed.

In House Rules, Jacob is an 18-year old with Asperger syndrome, raised by and living with his single mother Emma, carrying on a typical love/hate relationship with his 15-year old brother Theo. Obsession with the TV show CrimeBusters and crime scenes gets him into trouble when his social skills tutor and crush Jess ends up dead, and he steps in to lay out her corpse perfectly for the police to discover.

Arrested for Jess’s murder, Jacob struggles to explain his involvement in Jess’s death to his family, the police, and the courts. A great deal of the novel is spent on Jacob’s thoughts, then showing him fail to clearly verbalize those thoughts during his court case.

It’s nearly offensive that Picoult uses Asperger’s as a device to further complicate Jacob’s experience in the justice system.

Picoult draws hard lines between characters who understand Jacobs disability, those who don’t, and offers a few characters who will “get it” by the end of the book, going through their own journeys of education and understanding. It is at times schmaltzy, condescending, and too neatly wrapped up, how characters, just being around Jacob, transform, into better people. It’s a frightening use of handicapped people not as individuals but as tools to educate people without disabilities.

Picoult is also trying to do a lot here in terms of her style. She presents a murder mystery with not too much mystery to it, solved in just a few pages at the end of the book, which also feels manipulative. Most readers probably can guess the answer to the mystery early on, but Picoult hold out until the very end, offering no surprises. She is also taking a stand against ignorance about Asperger’s, and the message feels about as subtle as a bat to the head.

Thanks to my niece Chelsea for recommending House Rules.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Five Books to Escape into while Social Distancing

Maybe one day soon a headline will read, “Out of Netflix Content, More People Turn to Books for Relief.” If you’re already ready for some literary escapism, check out these five books I read and loved in 2019. Hopefully they help you in this difficult time: The Storm King , Brendan Duffy. This book has many things that would make me not choose it as a Top Five: a straight male hero; not many strong female leads; privileged men acting out their privilege. Alas, it sucked me in with a short, strong opening chapter that set the tone and the mystery for the rest of the book. Duffy’s writing is a bit dramatic at times, but that’s also what kept the pages quickly turning. You can check out my review here . The Soul of an Octopus , Sy Montgomery. Montgomery ’s beautiful work in The Soul of an Octopus gives us hope about the connectivity between living creatures. Introducing the reader to several octopuses she met at the New England Aqua...
Read more

Almost Too Much Covered in The Tradition

In his third book of poetry, The Tradition , Jericho Brown covers much ground: he grapples with myth, media, racism, his own mortality, and still manages to push past established forms of poetry. It’s impressive in scope, but the breadth can leave the reader forgetting the ground covered because there was too much of it. Brown conveys a disdain for the world around him that embraces and encourages racism and violence, but also exudes a confidence about his own abilities to navigate the terrain. This is a book from a grown, tired man, and is filled with the heartbreak and the fortitude he’s earned. He introduces, too, the “Duplex” form in his poetry, described by Jeannine Hall Gailey in her Barrelhouse review of The Tradition as “a sonnet-like series of couplets that include repetition.” The repetition accomplishes a layering of experiences and voices, making his experiences feel that much more echoed in the lives of others, as though he is not alone. These stories are from a...
Read more

A Chat with E. Christopher Clark, author of the Stains of Time series

In the first book of his Stains of Time series, E.Christopher Clark pulls in magical realism, a hearty dose of nineties’ nostalgia, and family drama to tell Veronica’s story. Pregnant at sixteen, Veronica marries the baby’s father to appease a father who might never be happy with her, but really won’t be happy with her if she follows her heart and dates women as she wants to. Clark kindly answered About a Book’s questions about The Piano of Death , the series as it stands now, and his plans for its future. About a Book : How/when did you conceive of The Piano of Death ? Clark : The book that people can read today really started to come together in September 2011. I met with my friend, the actor/director Crystal Lisbon…to plan a benefit for the arts organization she was starting. Another friend of Crystal’s, the musician Mary Casiello [joined us for that meeting]. We were trying to put together an evening of theater and music, and I was tasked with writing the scrip...
Read more