Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes
Although this is my fourth Jodi Picoult novel, this is the first I feel moved to review, probably because this is her most complex and achieved so far. Picoult specializes in courtroom dramas, and if this novel sticks to the rule: the subject is a difficult one, that makes the headlines too often: young people carrying a gun to school and targeting their peers. Nineteen Minutes deals with a school shooting, its causes and its aftermath.
While at first glance the novel deals with a subject similar to Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, it reminded me rather of other novels dealing with peer pressure and the striving for popularity, such as Prep or I am Charlotte Simmons. In We Need to talk about Kevin, it is the relationship between a reluctant mother and a difficult son which is examined. In Nineteen Minutes, Peter Houghton is a teenager who, from the first day of kindergarten, has been targeted as the scapegoat by the other kids. His parents are loving but have tried to toughen him up, sometimes clumsily. He also had a big brother who died the previous year, a perfect boy, athletic and popular, an impossible example for him to emulate. Through the years, Peter is subjected to numerous beatings, humiliations, and abuses. His only childhood friend, Josie Comier, daughter of Alex, a (woman) judge who raised her alone, has been spared by Peter, who killed ten pupils and injured nineteen others. She alone knows what happened in the changing room where Peter ended his killing spree, but she has lost all memories of the dramatic events…
As usual with Jodi Picoult, the ending presents a twist (which I could have seen coming if I hadn’t been so taken by the development of the story). The whole story is riveting, maybe a bit too long, but Jody Picoult manages to explain the dynamics between all the characters, shifting between the past and the present to make the reader understand how a young man could accumulate such hate as to move him to take a gun and shoot at other young people. Picoult does not excuse what happens, but she shows that people such as Peter are not monsters, but fragile people driven to commit irreparable acts. At the end of the novel, we certainly don’t excuse, but we understand the reasons behind Peter’s monstrous deed. As usual Picoult presents us with moral dilemmas and offers no easy solution, but asks thought-provoking questions about responsibilities and guilt…
Nineteen Minutes is the best Jodi Picoult’s novel I have read so far.
Rating: 4/5
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