My Sister’s Keeper, A novel of ethics or an afterschool special?

Jodi Picoult's
My Sister’s Keeper, A novel of ethics/an afterschool special?
(Full of irresponsible spoilers) <> <> (2 diamonds out of 5)

When I ask eighteen-year-old students who they read, Jodi Picoult is one of the few living writers they mention, along with Rowling and whoever wrote the Twilight novels. The name escapes me. Jodi Picoult’s novel My Sister’s Keeper (Washington Square, 2004, 423 pages) has qualities that seem obviously suited to young readers. First of all the first person narrative: Every chapter is narrated by a different character, with plenty of dialogue and not much lingering over lyrical moments. Of course this kind of narration gives the book a sense of speed, moving forward, sometimes almost too insistent for the actual progress of the plot.

It is this movement that makes such a sharp difference with movie (2009, Directed by Nick Cassavetes and starring Cameron Diaz). The film is a swamp of sentimentality that may actually make it quite moving and successful for some audiences. It is a unabashed tear-jerker led by the characters of the film who each are required to cry, from mom to child and even the judge. Everyone must cry. I am certain that audiences cry as well—if they surrender to the concept. The book may make people cry as well but it seems to be less of a compulsion a requirement. The book has smart-ass sarcasm and some bizarre plot twists that make it less of a heart tug-fest. These sarcastic remarks and such are not superior humor, even dark humor. But they give the book a degree of readability that the film lacks. The book like I said has no stultifying lyrical passages, but the film has one every ten minutes, accompanied by slow motion bubble fights or some family friendly choreography and syrupy songs that are available on the popular sound track recording at a Borders near you. These passages seem almost designed to slow the movie down and to extend the running time to the requisite 103 minutes, barely over the mark.

The book is about a thirteen-year-old Anna who was designed to be a donor for her older sister 16 year old Kate and now she wants ot to be free of that responsibility and to make her own decisions so she sues her parents Sara and Brian Fitzgerald. They also have a neglected son Jesse wandering around. So Anna hires a lawyer who has a service dog for a mysterious reason and who also had a teen romance with the court appointed Guardian ad litem, Julia, who has a lesbian twin sister herself. Shewas my favorite character in the novel and was cut from the film script. Her duty as guardian was to look at the whole situation from an objective perspective and make a report to the court led by Judge De Salvo, a judge whose own daughter died at age 13 or so. The novel ends in a courtroom debate over ethical issues with experts and the family and the novel ends with bizarre twist of fate—almost too deus ex machina for me but why not. I won’t reveal it because it makes no real difference to the point of the book.
Incidentally the father Brian is a firefighter searching for an arsonist who tunrs out to be his son Jesse—acting out for all that neglect, which Dad analyzes thoroughly in Freudian terms and which when he discovers it he hugs out of him and decodes not to report to the police. And Jesse who becomes an art student in the film becomes a cop in the novel—another irony.

Was it Louis Be Mayer of MGM who said if you want to deliver a message send a telegram. Well now it would be a Tweet but the idea is the same. The book and the film are devoted to messages. I would say that the messages in each are related but not the same. The film is about grieving and the book is about rights. The film is about the parents and the novel is about the children. In the novel I started listing the references to ethics at page 100 and counted a dozen explicit references to ethical dilemmas including legal ethics, the difference between morality and ethics, the medical ethics and procedures and the hospital committee that decides, the lawyer’s professional ethics, the ethics of the health insurance company, doctor-patient ethics, individual rights and ethics, even personal (parent-child and lover-lover) ethical relationships are discussed. In the film, on the other hand, ethics are never mentioned and the issue is relegated to innuendo and implications in testimony that is notably fragmentary.

I liked the book but saw that it had problems from the start. The main one was the strangely out of place references and allusions that were made by children who would have no reason to know about the things that Picoult was putting in their mouths—like a peculiar reference to The Brady Bunch or to Tony Robbins. Listen to the dialogue:

Anna at thirteen: “If Mr. Webster had decided to put the word freak in his dictionary, Anna Fitzgerald would be the best definition he could give. It’s more than just the way I look: refugee-skinny with absolutely no chest to speak of, hair the color of dirt, connect the dot freckles on my cheeks …

Picoult runs into the problems of first person narrative as she loads these children sometimes at age five or six with completely anachronistic references or word choices. At a much older age—18—Picoult has Jesse, for example, the troubled brother, describe his adventures at a boot camp for delinquents. He saves a newborn sheep and ends the episode as follows: “A minute later it unbent its clothespin legs and started whickering for its mother.” (324) I am sure the word whickering is in the OED. But this incoherent diction shows most of all that the author needs to write from some perspective that allows her to use the exciting language she seems to be drawn to. This first person style with children expostulating only leads to silly nonsensical non sequiturs.

I really looked forward to seeing what the film would do with this diction problem. And not surprisingly it cut all the lofty diction and pseudo-genius talk out. The characters were even younger in the film by a year or two and the language was for the most part not a focus of the film at all. The main character in the book is Anna the girl who wants to be medically emancipated from giving organs or body parts to her sister Kate, but the film focuses on Kate as victim mostly pathetically, and on Sara her mother who in the novel is almost evil but in the person of Cameron Diaz who won an ALMA (a Latin American organization) award for this film, is recuperated quite a a bit, from evil to misguided at times but redeemed and very much lovable at all times. The film is a failure and the book is often marginal but Picoult has a point to make and makes it as well as she can in a readable novel with a message.

Now a personal and perhaps inappropriate reaction. Picoult was congratulated in the interview at the end of the novel—designed for the inevitable Oprah Reading Clubs—for her ability to write the feelings and voices of men. This is not so. She has absolutely no ability to capture male perspectives unless they are the kind you find in some types of romantic comedy and since I have never lived in Rhode Island it could also be a male Rhode Island voice. I don’t know. You have to read Brian’s and Jesse’s and Campbell’s (a strange almost embarrassingly naïve new age east coast elitist name) and decide for yourself but the results I think must be in. The book is popular with girls because it is geared to girls (Best Teen Movie Award winner) and the movie is the quintessential chick-flick where the male characters practically disappear, go ahead; put them on the stop watch. And while we are at it Picoult is also a class elitist with a love for bling and a failure at reflecting any diversity at all in ethnicity or other annoying complications of our socio-economic world. The film does much better at this social complexity, usually by hiding it or by throwing in a black nurse or an ethnic patient

Re-Reading the Sixties

I walked into the classroom last week and a few students in my writing class were arguing about which was better: the Harry Potter (sorcerer) books or the Twilight (vampire) books. They asked me. I told them that I had read very little of either and would maybe prefer the HP books by a narrow margin based mostly on my ignorance of the other series. Mostly I was a little concerned that young readers were reading such useless trash. I said in an offhanded way that I love trash culture like action movies and second rate novels. And the students were offended. These books were important to them. They were their doorway to reading and to culture and to some social connections with fellow fans. For that these books deserved to be appreciated. I kept telling them that I thought there was a place for trash in our cultural lives but they did not like the word. And I don't blame them.

Maybe a dozen years ago when I was teaching writing I asked students about their reading and I found that they did not read books much at all for pleasure. The books they mentioned were the things they were given by teachers, most often Salinger's Catcher in the Rye or The Red Pony or something like that. In fact over the years I have most often been surprised that reading is such a puzzle for 18-year-olds. We have not been a reading culture for a number of decades. I think many students in college get a love of reading in a few years but it starts slow.

It may have been worse when the phone and the pager was the major social networking device. Later with email and then Facebook/twitter written language got a little more currency. But the text has not been a major force in young alternative or counter-cultural thought for many years.It was big in revolutionary times or reformist times back to the eighteenth century. Periodical journalism has been blamed for the American Revolution by historian Bernard Bailyn. It certainly meant a lot to the 19th century revolt and reform from Dickens to Frank Norris (as in There will Be Blood).

The same written non-mainstream views seemed to be important to the 1960's probably because the atmosphere was so restrictive to alternative thought. That is not true today. Today the world is full of outlets for expressing an alternative view, but the world is much more noisy and the voices are harder to find and to surround and build into a social network. It then became a war of who could get noticed and that meant advertising and the result is the blockbuster mega series like HP and Twilight with their ubermarketing strategies.

In the 1960's there were a variety of books and voices that people were attracted to. I know that I did not read all of them or that the ones I read were not what everyone read. But, because of my age and my location, I had a fairly noteworthy perspective on counter-culture and oppositional literature, things that were out of the mainstream but in some kind of large sub-stream nevertheless. Many of the titles are recognizable to many people and I do not want them to be forgotten. These books and writers changed my life, even if I did not read them very well and even if now I could look at their work as less than perfect.

Be that as it may, I decided a few years ago to reread many of the books I read or tried to read when I was a teenager and in my early twenties. I don't expect that they will be making a comeback; some are anachronistic in image and some in language and some in philosophy. Some are trash. They have backwardnesses in thought that people should find quite unacceptable. But they represent a peculiar canon of literature and thought that helped to shape a generation that some people find transitional and generative of new thought and new ways of living. I recall thinking that the American writers of the twenties were special and that the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was special and that the poets of the Tang Dynasty were special to name a few. So I do not think it is unjustified to call the thinkers and writers of the years surrounding and influencing the 1960s exceptional. It was worldwide, but I found it most pervasive growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area.


I was eleven in 1960 and 21 in 1970. During that period I read many books rather badly but with great enthusiasm. Many of the books were written in other decades. I am unconcerned with the overlap into the 1970s. But I can assure you it will not be a long overlap. I am not going to list them in chronological order or in order of importance. Maybe when after a few years I am through the whole list I will try to organize them in some useful way. But now I am just going about the casual process of reading them again and thinking about them. I own a few books from the ancient past disintegrating like mummified cookies. But most often I find a copy of something I read in a used book store and buy it for a few dollars and put it on a special shelf where I keep the books of my youth. I won't attempt to list even what I have already found because it may sound like I have some ulterior plan or organizing principle when they are all serendipitous survivors from the past or rescued from some island where they have been languishing for a few decades. And I choose to read them impulsively.

Most important I want to say that almost none of these books were assigned by any class or by any teacher. I was a horrid high school student in my later years and I was a drop out of college for the first few years of the 1970s. So no expert was telling me to read anything, except my friends and maybe the bookstores I wandered into which included City Lights in SF. I did a lot of searching and judged a lot of books by their covers and made some felicitous and some stinky choices. I followed trails from one writer to another--Merton would mention Blake or Ginsberg would mention Whitman or Kerouac would mention Gary Snyder. I looked for German and for French and for Chinese writers. I found cliques and circles and opponents. I never understood it all very well. I was naive and it seemed like I was always searching in these complex books for something bright and shiny and missing the bulk of what was there. But despite my juvenile shortcomings I got something from it all nevertheless.

Maxfield Parrish and Michael Jackson

Some of the most important things that happen in Santa Cruz are things that did not happen. When you walk into the Beach Street Cafe where else? in the same building but not owned by the Boardwalk Bowl, you can look to your left and see a large print of the DayBreak 1922 by Maxfield Parrish. Perhaps this is the most famous of Parrish's illustrations, especially since it was reenacted tableau Vivant-like by Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley for some reason. There is no doubt that Jackson and Parrish shared some mutual fascinations and maybe that is explanation enough. As you look around the room you will see two hundred more Maxfield Parrish prints, magazine covers, advertisements, illustrations and whatever, certainly what must be the biggest collection of Parrishables north of Carmel and south of Saratoga. I would guess that there are or were another sixty illustrations upstairs in the hallway that leads to the WC and it would not be a guess because I am a compulsive counter of things that are obsessively displayed. So the cafe of Willy and Dolly Case has always been a favorite place for Ginny and me to have pesto omelets or chorizo scrambles and mimosas and to count all those Hearst magazine covers and old King Coles once again. Then last fall I heard that the collection was going to be removed from the cafe. It was feared the illustrations would be too damaged by the sun. The cafe with its south facing has often some bright and warm days. Of course they have already hung there for decades? Then I heard the collection would be broken up and auctioned off. I heard it was going to go away in February of this year. The story did not change in December or in January and even seemed to be still hanging over us in February, but now I have heard that NO the collection will not be moved. So this is a story of an event that did not happen. I have much to say about Maxfield Parrish and whether he deserves this kind of shrine but I will leave that until another time. The obsessivenrss of it makes seeing the collection deserving.

John Edwards needs to go Graphic

Yes. One reviewer I read said that the book The Politician, by Andrew Young, needed pictures. In reality it needs to be all pictures, a graphic novel, because all of the participants are somehow a caricature of what human beings, no less people who aspire to power, ought to be. The book feels like people who are engaged in some kind of parody of themselves--What would a man with a messiah complex say? What would an outraged wife do? How comically deranged can a girlfriend be? How deluded can a driver, a go-fer, and "body man" for a politician be? If it did not involve terminal cancer, innocent children, disrespect for friends and associates, and the not negligible chance that he might have won the presidency of the US, then the book would be just comedy. As it is, it is farce with a dark edges that ought to be filmed with puppets by Tim Burton. Or done as a staged reading. The self-aggrandizement, the brutal dishonesty to everyone including themselves and the absolute greedy desire to be in the lap of luxury and power and to call it working class values is stunning. Even the penchant of the writer Young--who has no skills to speak of except clarity and complete naivete--to be sappy and sentimental is appalling. The meditations about his cheating--horse-killing?--father (the prologue is almost unbearable) or about his coming to Jesus about integrity (the epilogue is almost unbearable) and his struggles with conscience about lying, where the dark side always wins, these thoughts are absolutely astounding and must not be revised by a single word when the film is made.

The Making of the President 2.0

Read Game Change by Helperin et al. The book the jacket says is in the genre of Teddy White's Making of the President 1960 -- et al. I would combine this with a small pinch of Primary Colors, the fiction about Clinton's first campaign by Anonymous--or Joe Klein. The book is a great read except that most of the time you feel this overwhelming sense of de ja vu. It may make some people scan too much and miss the really good gossipy back stage stuff that makes the book work and that makes it a departure from White's somewhat reverential book. After all, if you have the political literacy to even read the book you must have paid some attention to the campaigns in real time. But this book gives you details like John McCain giving Cindy the bird with both hands as he repeatedly yells at her "F___ You! F___ You! F___ You!" Now that is a detail that really made sense to me. Or Elizabeth Edwards acting like a controlling monster and, obviously smarter than John, thoroughly hated by the staff of the campaign. That helped me to make sense of many slightly disorienting moments that were observable or even specifically cited themes. The repeated comments that no one in the US Senate liked John McCain, except Lindsay Graham and maybe Joe Lieberman. McCain is a train wreck and so is Elizabeth and so are a number of people who wanted to be the most powerful people in our country. If you do not read this and get this message that is carefully scrubbed from the video record, then you are missing the glue that holds all of these cracked pots together. The book does use the term game change too often. It reminds me of those Washington press and TV terms like the back story and the take away and on the other side. Or __________ 2.0!

opening

Welcome to the beginning of a new discussion of politics and news in Santa Cruz and in the world at large. Our community has been long recognized as a hotbed of liberal/radical thought and action. I have been a part of that process. I was on the city council for 8 year, 1998-2006, and the Mayor in 2000-2001. I have seen the community in good and in bad times financially and politically.
We are confronting a period of great challenge to our political radicalism and our efforts to shape a caring community, primarily as a result of economic problems but also as a result of different priorities in the local government. I want to comment on that circumstance and on the future of Santa Cruz and of political liberalism in general.
It seems to me we need to look at how we can keep a liberal patriotism alive in the face of great challenges to liberal thought but also in a time when the President of the United States could be the most determined liberal president in my lifetime. We need to continue to make the next generation and the day to day life of this community a successful example of justice and activist democracy. If you have a comment about this effort and ways to make it focused and useful, please contribute your thoughts.