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April 22, 2005
Vanishing Acts -- Jodi Picoult **
Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper is a novel that really worked for me on multiple levels, so much so that I've bought copies for a few friends. Some of her other novels I liked almost as much, and so I was looking forward to this new one, Vanishing Acts. Which fell flat.
This is a novel about a young woman who works in search and rescue from her home in New Hampshire. Delia's the single mother of a four year old girl, engaged to the father of her child, who has been a major force in her life since she was very young. Three of the main characters are Delia, her fiance, Eric, and Fitz. These three grew up as neighbors, and have been best friends forever. When the story opens, Eric is a recovering alcoholic; Fitz has always been in love with Delia, but stands back for fear of losing the two people who mean most to him in the world.
Early in the novel Delia finds out that contrary to what her father has told her for many years, her mother did not die in a car accident. When she was four years old, her father abducted her during a custody visit. For twenty-eight years she has been living under a name which is not really her own. Her father, who she respects and loves and likes a great deal, is arrested and extradited to Phoenix -- where her mother lives -- to stand trial. Delia asks Eric to defend her father; Fitz, who is a newspaper reporter, is assigned to cover the case. Thus the whole crew -- Delia, Eric, Fitz, the four year old Sophie, Delia's blood hound Greta, and Delia's father, Andrew/Charlie, move (along with the plot) to Arizona for the trial.
You can see that there is a huge amount of material to deal with here: the complex of reasons that led Charlie to take his daughter and run, the way his relationship to his daughter must change, the stresses put on Eric, who is expected to handle everything and solve the whole mess (and stay sober, though he has only been on the wagon a relatively short time). Fitz longing for Delia; Sophie coping with a new place. Add to this Delia getting to know her mother and start remembering her past, us getting to know the defense attorney, the judge, and other supplemental characters. It takes a skilled storyteller to pull this off. Picoult is a very skilled storyteller, but she stumbles. The problem, I think, is two fold.
I've talked before about researching a novel. What goes into it, how research can be so interesting and rewarding. How careful you have to be to not overwhelm your reader with the fruits of your labor. My sense of what went wrong with this novel has to do with the fact that Picoult got too wound up in her research about what it would mean for a sixty-ish male with no violent history to go to jail. In the chapters where Andrew/Charlie (new name/old name) narrates, there are two dominant themes: what happened in the past -- his relationship with his exwife, and what made him abduct his daughter; and his experiences in jail. The first theme is what I wanted to know about, but mostly what I got was the second.
There is a lot of detail here about the indignities, small and large, of life in jail. How someone could get caught up in drug trafficking, racial conflicts, how to make meth amphetamine, how to make a zip gun. These details are all well handled, but they don't belong in this novel. The research got the upper hand, and the novel suffers for it.
Even abstracting away from those long passages which slow down the flow, there are problems. There are late revelations which are too big and thorny to be given such short treatment, among them one of the reasons for the abduction that Andrew has held back until he is on the stand, and even worse: what happens when Eric starts drinking. Delia makes decisions and acts out in ways that struck the wrong chord for me, and she makes them in a hurry, so I was left feeling manipulated and dissatisfied. Another aspect of this problem is that unlike Picoult's other novels which are told in the same way -- each chapter by a different character -- in this case, the voices are not distinct enough from one another. All the characters make the same kind of very ethereal comments and observe the world around them in the same way, so that I sometimes forgot who was at bat.
Picoult has shown in other novels that she's not afraid to take on a lot and juggle it all, and beyond that, to confound expectations. Usually she pulls it off. In this case, I'm sorry to say, she didn't.
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email problems
So a couple things: if you've emailed me and not heard back, that may be the reason. The other reason may just be that I'm overwhelmed and trying to stay focused on writing these days. So please be patient.
When I have time and energy to deal in a more proactive way with the spam issue, I'll do the research and figure out if there's a better way to handle this. Or if anybody has a suggestion (maybe I should just change my email address, and bounce everything that comes to the old one -- would that work?) please do speak up.
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