Scary Stories

Do you read Jodi Picoult's novels?

I don't, but my friends do and highly recommend them, repeatedly. I have shied away without any good reasons except wariness of books that are everywhere--not just bookstores, but grocery stores, convenience stores, drug stores, and airports (it took me more than 4 years to read DaVinci Code, finally goaded by guilt after a maternal brouhaha. It was okay. Yes, I can be a book snob, about other people's books; my twinkie books are good! It's a holdover from being an academic, straight A student snob).

Having read both an article and a blog post about the author and her novels, I now know I was right to stay away from her books. Describing the books, Gina Bellafante writes:

IN THE NOVELS of Jodi Picoult, terrible things happen to children of middle-class parentage: they become terminally ill, or are maimed, gunned down, killed in accidents, molested, abducted, bullied, traumatized, stirred to violence. The assault on any individual family is typically mounted from angles multiple and unforeseen.

But, I am not one of those people, such as Motherlode author Lisa Belkin, who needs such reading as part of their ritual of worry. Writes Belkin,

But the act of worry is almost a talisman now, a ritual that reminds me how fragile the moment, and how much to savor the now. Notice that all my worries are about my children. I’ve come to understand that that’s what parenting is — seeing the dangers of the world with newly sensitive eyes, pretending you can protect them, and giving thanks for all the things that don’t go wrong.

Does that mean I don't worry about my kids? No, of course not. I'm just not looking for new things to worry about, like clerical sexual abuse, murder, terminal illnesses, just some of the topics of her novels. And I don't have a cathartic release reading (or watching, because, as Bellafante notes, these novels often become tv movies or series episodes) such books. I don't really feel lucky that it's not us or prepared for the possibility of it being us. And so that leaves little impetus for reading Picoult's books, or any in the genre of endangered-child novels (Bellafante traces the emergence of the genre to the 1980s, when, because of various news events from the McMartin preschool case to the Adam Walsh kidnapping, society became--and continues to be--obsessed with worrying about the fate of its children even in seemingly safe environments.). Picoult herself sees her novels almost as community service, noting "Maybe the average reader is not facing the daily challenges of a mom whose child is dying of cancer, for example, but she probably had an argument with her teenager that morning about something inconsequential that left her feeling frustrated and certain there’s no middle ground between them." Picoult hopes her books provide that middle ground. For now, I try to find that middle ground without scaring or worrying myself to death by reading such novels. Which is probably why I usually just read cookbooks!