Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
“Wish You Were Here” by Jodi Picoult is a book for our times. Like Diana, the protagonist leaves on vacation for the Galapagos Islands, the pandemic is worsening in New York City and around the world. Her boyfriend Finn is a medical assistant at a New York hospital and sees the pandemic spreading on the island of Isabela. Diana is an associate at Sotheby’s auction house and observes the work for dents etc. Her mother is at a care facility and often doesn’t recognize her daughter. But she often didn’t know her as her child either. Her father saved paintings, at cathedrals as a conservator so she knows and loves the art business.
She has a chance to get a Toulouse Lautrec for Sotheby’s. Finn writes her a long e-mail about how COVID cases have multiplied and gone to extremes. She writes him back but there’s no Internet connection. Though she has no food an old woman leaves food at her door, all the stores are closed, and no people are around. It’s like a ghost town and she wants to leave, to get back to New York, to be with Finn.
The old woman gives her grandson’s apartment to Diana and won’t take money for it. Diana sees the young girl from the ferry boat and realizes she’s her granddaughter and the daughter of Gabriel. ‘The young girl has cut her arms and is bleeding. Diana’s days meld into a routine, she swims and lies on the beach and recites poetry, and cooks pasta for her dinner. Diana and the young girl, Beatriz build sandcastles together. One night Diana and Beatriz have dinner at grandma’s house and Gabriel and Diana talk and feel a kinship. He offers to show Diana his island. She and Finn write to each other about their days, his at the hospital, and how bad the virus is.
Author Picoult tells us about Darwin and his theory of natural selection based on the Finches who changed to adapt to their circumstances. Gabriel says the birds reproduced which confirmed the survival of the fittest. History is written by the winners, he says. At the market, locals exchange goods, not money. When Diana connects with Finn she learns her mother at the memory facility has Covid but is stable. They’re taking care of her. Gabriel takes Diana snorkels with Diana at a beautiful pool where she dives in her clothes and sees a rainbow of colors under the sea. He tells her about the iguanas and their habits.
Back at Sotheby’s Diana tells Kitoni Ito how she’d provide a private room for the sale of Katomi’s painting and invite-only loving couples to see it. Katomi agrees to this idea and Diana’s boss is stunned. It is the break Diana needs for a promotion, and it works.
Beatriz and Diana climb down into the belly of a volcano. It’s scary and wonderful. Beatriz confesses there is a girl she loves, has kissed, but can’t go back to school. By the fifth week of the lockdown on the island, more natives are out and about because of no new COVID cases and no new arrivals. Gabriel tells Diana she’s different now not in her looks but inside. After her mother dies of COVID complications, Diana drowns her sorrow in Gabriel’s bed, though her mother was never there when needed.
Diana is on the island with Gabriel when Beatriz finds them together. She runs away. They look everywhere and find only her backpack. In it are the postcards Diana planned to mail to Finn. So Finn hasn’t heard from Diana at all. They find the girl at the bottom of the volcano, crying and Gabriel takes her home and tells her she is loved, and is important to him.
Suddenly we find Diana in ICU in Finn’s hospital. She’s confused because of COVID and thinks she’s been swimming in the Galapagos. Turns out, she never went. No one believes she was in the Galapagos skin diving or down a volcano with Gabriel. She feels as if she’s insane. Maybe she is. She still believes she was on the islands with Gabriel and Abeula and Beatriz.
She calls the Green rehab center where her mother was living and learns that she’s alive, and never died.
Slowly with hours of physical therapy, Diana improves and graduates from a wheelchair to a walker to standing alone. Soon she tests negative for COVID and Finn comes to see her. Her friend Rodney is on the phone and convinces her that her trip to the Galapagos wasn’t real, but she had memorized the information and maps from her guidebook she’d read the night before she got Covid.
At their apartment, Finn and she eat sushi and make love. She looks in the newspaper for jobs in the art world. At first in the art business then in art therapy. What she’d done with Beatriz (if it was true) was art therapy which includes selfesteem and emotional coping. She goes to the Greens to visit with her mother on the porch, where she sneaks a photo of her mother when she was younger.
Diana says it was her reality, not a dream, that Gabriel still appears to her and she paints a picture of the lagoon on the back of her bureau where they swam. She and Finn go for a walk in Central Park and he gives her a diamond ring. Does she accept his proposal? Does she get a job doing art therapy?
Author Picoult wants to show what we’ve learned during the pandemic. She shows it as a resident of a community and how evolution helps us survive. Find out how this experience can change our lives, on the new fiction shelf of your local library.