Ruth Jefferson is a good church-going nurse and mother, a woman reluctant to speak up about the low-level racism that serves as a dangerous background hum to her daily life.
Unlike her outspoken sister, she’s determined to be respectable. To conform. To not notice the terrifying structural inequalities that mean that the colour of her skin is the first – and often the only – thing people notice about her.
“All these building blocks of my existence,” she thinks, “and yet the only quality straddling the other side is so hulking and dense that it tips the balance every time: my brown skin.”
Blamed for a new-born baby’s death by his white supremacist parents, Ruth becomes entangled in the sort of courtroom drama that drives the majority of Jodi Picoult’s 20-odd novels. Sharing the narration are the baby’s father, Turk, who runs an online neo-Nazi forum, and Kennedy, the well-intentioned public defender who insists that she doesn’t even notice race and will, by the trial’s end, have confronted her own white privilege.
Kennedy serves as the reader’s stand-in throughout, learning that racist behaviour is not limited to acts of overt aggression but includes constant monitoring and suspicion. If this sounds didactic, it often is, which is unfortunate for an author who has managed to avoid getting too preachy even when writing about death row inmates or the Holocaust.
Uneasy sense
There is also a slightly uneasy sense that
Small Great Things
is a book
about
but not necessarily
for
people of colour, and the earnest “author’s note” inadvertently emphasises the extent to which Picoult considers her readership to be largely white Americans who need to examine their own privilege.
Her black characters are still the “other”, with skin being compared to coffee more than once. This is an embarrassing cliché when depicting characters of colour and one that feels out of place in what is clearly a well-researched work.
The depiction of Turk’s activities within the skinhead movement, combined with his fierce devotion to a thoroughly unpleasant wife (one of their early dates involves a gay-bashing expedition), is – I suspect – also pitched more at white liberal readers in an attempt to get them empathising with vicious racists and to inspire them to “begin conversations” about prejudice in America.
Those who are targets of violence and intimidation are already conscious of the dangers out there and don’t need to relive them from the perpetrator’s perspective.
Surprise twist
A surprise twist of the kind Picoult is well-known for also undermines much of what has gone before and prompts a change of heart for one character that seems most implausible. The author’s note reveals that this, like many of the events in the novel, is based on fact, but its execution in fiction fails to convince.
And yet, despite all this, it mainly succeeds in what it is trying to do: to get its white, liberal readers shuffling uncomfortably as the drama escalates. It seeks to draw them in by telling them a story and then hits them with moment after moment that reveals just how much race matters when you are anything other than the “default” white.
It may be heavy-handed in its delivery but at no point throughout the novel do the discrimination and violence portrayed ever feel unrealistic. If it feels “too much” at points, perhaps it is unfair to condemn it for this.
The racist (among other -ists) climate in the United States is deeply alarming, beyond “too much”. This might not be Picoult’s most skilfully written novel, but it may well end up being her most important.
Claire Hennessy is a writer, editor and creative writing facilitator
