Nineteen Minutes: a Review
Best seller Jodi Picoult's new book misses the mark
Review of novel, Nineteen Minutes. Author of fourteen hot novels, one of America's more productive writers disappoints. Read the review by Maryan Pelland.
Nineteen Minutes
By Jodi Picoult, Atria Books
March 2007 $26.95 451 pages
ISBN 0743496728
Nobody has a winner every time, even best-selling author, Jodi Picoult, who might have bitten off a bitter chunk with this project.
Nineteen Minutes, scheduled for release next week, has a sensational plot based on horrible true scenarios. I wonder, should artists profit from national tragedies like 911 and mass shootings in schools? Picoult’s novel calls upon both. And I guess the answer is, sure, why not? We buy the books and see the movies, in droves. You can’t keep us away.
But wrapping a sensitive, dark and frightening reality inside a silly boy-meets-girl, boy-solves case, girl-is-too-old-to-be-so-giddy romance is, in a word, bad.
The plot. A bullied boy, Peter, is mired in the depression of life-long harassment by cool kids. One cool kid, Josie, is the daughter of a judge. When Josie and Peter were in pre-school, she was his best friend. She spent every spare moment with him – adored him.
Time passes. Josie becomes cool. Drops Peter like last season’s designer label. Just like everyone else has done. He is seen by all as a substandard human, evidently because he likes computers.
After a cool guy, Josie’s football hero boyfriend, humiliates Peter at school and another cool guy does something mean via email, Peter sets off a pipe bomb in the school parking lot and the rampage begins.
Peter becomes a killer. Shoots ten people in school.
Josie’s mom is in line to try him.
The story continues with investigation and trial. If you read newspapers or watch the 6 o’clock news, you’ve been here before.
What the author and publisher sell as a complex, deeply emotional book, filled with insights, offers little. Conclusions are obvious by end of section one. For example, the aggressive, man-hating, single mom, female judge pleads her personal conviction that she doesn’t need a man to complete her.
A few chapters later, after bumping into the crime-solving love-interest for just the second time, she girlishly changes her personality, practically leaping into bed with him.
Errors, inconsistencies and glaring bloopers punctuate Nineteen Minutes. It isn’t a good read, though it could have been with a bit more attention to the meat of the thing and a careful review of the plot elements on someone’s part.
They might have caught the fact that in Nineteen, we have a computer genius of a main character creating complicated games with a language that simply can’t do Picoult’s bidding. She then has Peter hit “control, alt, delete” and his computer screen goes blank, in a pivotal scene. Unless you are using Windows 3.1, hit those keys – did your screen go blank? NO? Then how did Peter escape those personal computer demons?
The reader watches main characters’ behaviors do 180 turns with no apparent reasons. Confusing dialogs have no antecedents in prior scenes. The murderer’s defender is rabid to have Judge Josie’s mom get the case. The only other available judge is hatefully biased toward all prosecutors. Pages later, the defender is beyond thigh-slapping delight when mom recuses herself and he is stuck with the bad-guy judge.
Most impossible is the trick ending. Without spoilers, I’ll say only that a main character does something non-believable. Picoult forces illogical logic right down our gullets. To compound that, the logic sets up via a physical impossibility.
About 300 pages into the plot, Josie sits outside the school site after the shooting has taken place, musing that the “grownups” have torn down the gym, the cafeteria, and all other sites of the shooting so the kids would forget it all.
One hundred pages and a month later in time, the hero detective stands in that very gym. It’s magically intact, and he finds a bullet somehow overlooked by all other crime scene investigators. Carrying in his pocket precisely the right tools to hit on the clue, he deduces, with a pocket laser pointer, that the rest of the bullet must have traveled a particular path through the air, out the small slit of an open transom window, into to the schoolyard and embed itself in a fortuitous tree. Digging the minuscule fragment from the tree, he runs to the court room, bursts in and....
Reader is out in left field, empty catcher’s mitt dangling limply from one sad hand.
I was taught early that writers must submit their best efforts, no matter the project. It’s an obligation bards have. They must read their work after writing it – making sure they’ve said what they wanted to say.
I can’t recommend this book. From the choice of topic, to the limp treatment of a tragic situation, to the staccato stabbings of inaccurate detail, I wondered if Picoult ever reread a single page.
Nineteen Minutes cleverly hands readers, at one point, a list of things that can be done in 19 minutes. You can mow the lawn, color your hair, watch the news on TV. You'd probably feel more satisfaction doing any of the above.
