A bestselling white writer tackles the tough subject of racism
Jodi Picoult’s latest book tackles the tough subject of racism.
Can a white author write convincingly about racism from a black character’s point of view? Lionel Shriver recently claimed that fiction would suffer if authors were afraid to write about cultures not their own – afraid “to try on other people’s hats”. Critics accused Shriver of using fiction as a free pass for cultural exploitation, and pointed out that white authors who write about minority characters have an easier ride to popular success than non-white authors who write about their own experiences.
Jodi Picoult is undeniably a popular success, selling in the millions. Although she’s tackled tough topics – school shootings, euthanasia – it took her 20 years to summon the courage to explore racism, a subject she admits is “fraught”, in her latest novel, Small Great Things.
In it, she tries on three hats, telling the story from the first-person points of view of Ruth Jefferson, a black maternity-unit nurse; Turk Bauer, a white supremacist; and Kennedy McQuarrie, a white female public defender. Turk and his wife tell the hospital to keep Ruth away from their newborn son, but when the baby goes into cardiac arrest, Ruth is the only nurse present. The baby dies, and Ruth is charged with negligent homicide. With her husband long dead and a teenage son to care for, the now-jobless Ruth depends on Kennedy, who is sympathetic but insists race has no place in the courtroom.
In her author’s note, Picoult says she did not write the book for “people of colour” but to tell “other white people … the benefits they’ve enjoyed in life are the direct result of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits”. And Small Great Things has a mother lode of instruction about all aspects of racism, from ingrained institutional discrimination to the casual, everyday sense of entitlement of white people, including those who would be horrified to be accused of prejudice.
There are lessons on black history – or “everyone’s history”, as one character puts it – and on the social costs of black people being more likely to be poor, uneducated and in jail. Ruth’s sister, Adisa (born Rachel), berates her for trying too hard to fit into a white world. Yet how can Ruth’s high-achieving son succeed if he doesn’t work within the system? And there’s insight into the ideology of the white supremacy rabidly espoused by Turk’s wife and father-in-law.
She effectively builds dramatic tension and empathy with each character, likeable and not.
At times, the writing can be cloying and overly didactic, as if Picoult felt a need to spell it out for the less quick. But there are many excellent moments, particularly those when white liberal readers will have a strong urge to distance themselves from their cringeworthy fictional counterparts. Whether she has accurately captured a black person’s experience is impossible for this white reviewer to judge. But she effectively builds dramatic tension and empathy with each character, likeable and not, making Small Great Things
hard to put down.