A little PO’d at Jodi Picoult

It’s not easy to watch certain movies or read certain books, ever since Alex came along. I do like to keep up with how people with developmental disabilities are being portrayed, so I make it my business to watch movies like “Pumpkin” “Rain Man” and keep up with books like Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”

But then I come across something like the following in one of Jodi Picoult’s novels ripped from a newspaper’s front page. In this case, a high school boy who’s been bullied since kindergarten is in prison awaiting trial after shooting ten of his classmates.

Drawing/photo by Fated to Pretend (flickr.com)

“Hey, Houghton,” a correctional officer said, “we got a present for you.”

Standing behind him was a kid not much older than Peter. He was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet and he had snot running down his nose. The officer led him into the cell. “Make sure you share your cake,” the officer said.

Peter sat down on the lower bunk, just to let this kid know exactly who was in charge. The boy stood with his arms crossed tight around the blanket he’d been given, staring down at the ground. He reached up and pushed his glasses up his nose, and that’s when Peter realized there was something, well, wrong with him. He had that glassy-eyed, gum-lipped look of a special-needs kid.

Peter realized why they’d stuck the kid in his cell instead of anyone else’s: they figured Peter would be least likely to fuck with him.

He felt his hands ball into fists. “Hey, you,” Peter said.
The boy swiveled his head toward Peter. “I have a dog,” he said. “Do you have a dog?”
Peter pictured the correctional officers watching this comedy through their little video hookups, expecting Peter to put up with this shit.

Expecting something of him, period.

He reached forward and plucked the glasses off the kid’s nose. They were coke-bottle-thick, with black plastic frames. The boy started to shriek, grabbing at his own face. His scream sounded like an air horn.

Peter put the glasses down on the floor and stomped on them, but in his rubber flip-flops that didn’t do much damage. So he picked them up and smashed them into the bars of the cell until the glass shattered.

From “Nineteen Minutes,” by Jodi Picoult.

Just what is this boy doing here, in this 455-page book? We never see him again. I guess I found it an offensive portrait because it’s so sketchy and so gratuitous. He has two lines, and they make him sound as if he’s about four years old. In which case, would he really be in a maximum security prison, or would he have been remanded to a psychiatric facility? And just what did he do, this boy who can’t wipe his nose, who rocks back and forth and who cares about dogs? What was his crime, other than being a boy with a developmental disability standing conveniently around when Picoult needed such a character to illustrate a sea change her main character is undergoing. He’s cracking under pressure; his cruelty to this boy is out of character.

A friend of mine who studies literary theory points out that the boy is an object to the guards (”We have a present for you”), but I think unwittingly Picoult also objectifies the boy. It’s remarkable in that she seems to reach for nuanced characterizations. “Power relations. See Michel Foucoult,” my friend said. I’m drawing the line here, at least for now. It just struck a raw nerve, harsher than “Of Mice and Men” and as manipulative as “I Am Sam.”