"Small Great Things" by Jodi Picoult

Ruth is a black nurse with twenty years experience delivering babies. But her next patients are Turk and Brit, a white supremacist couple, who ask that she be not allowed to care for their newborn baby Davis. However, it is Ruth who finds Davis dying in the nursery. Should she treat him or not? After David dies, Ruth is blamed for causing his death, sacked from the hospital and charged with murder. A single mother without a source of income she is forced to use a public defender, privileged white woman Kennedy.

I am always surprised by the precariousness of American life. Ruth has worked for twenty years and yet a single incident can thrust her onto the breadline; there is no question that she might be suspended on full pay while the allegations are considered, there seems to be no question that her knee-jerk dismissal might be challenged. When she is arrested she appears in court in her nightgown; even when she is released from prison on bail the nightgown is the clothing she is given for her release.

Picoult is excellent when she describes the minutiae of everyday racism. I fully bought in to the character of Ruth to the extent that I was sure for a while that Picoult must be an African American. I was less convinced by the character of Turk, the white supremacist, and his character arc seemed rushed at the end.

The plot has a classic structure. The first act ends with Ruth losing her job; it is almost exactly at the 25% mark. The 50% mark is where Ruth reaches what appears to be her lowest point: working at McDonalds and discovered there both by her horrified son and her defence lawyer; this is the point at which Ruth decides she needs the help of Wallace Mercy, a black activist. The murder trial begins at more or less the 75% mark.

Jane Smiley in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel suggests that the exposition of the novel (setting out the stall) must be completed by the 10% mark. This is the moment when Ruth discovers she has been removed from the care of the patient because of her colour; it is ;perhaps the moment when we become aware of her colour. Smiley also states that the 90% mark is the climax. This is the point at which Kennedy the lawyer, decides to play the race card and when Edison, Ruth's son, goes off the rails.

But the main thing about the plot is that it is so well woven that there is always something else happening to make you turn the pages.

The prose is also good. Picoult is especially skillful at using a single short sentence, in paragraph all by itself, to jab home a message.

This is a book that made me turn pages, desperate to find out what had happened, hoping beyond hope for a happy ending but uncertain of what the ending would be until almost the final page. This is a book in which I utterly identified with the protagonist. My only criticism is that I felt that the story was perhaps a little too issue driven; I would have liked to get deeper into the characters; to some extent the characters were representatives of positions rather than flesh and blood; this was most true of Turk and, to some extent, of Kennedy.

Great lines:

• "Lost in a world of made of Ms Mina's pain and fear, trying to be the map that she could follow out of it."
• "One of those people for whom life is just the space between crises."
• "He's bouncing the heel of one boot like he can't quite stay still."
• "Turk Bauer makes me think of a power line that's snapped during a storm, and lies across the road just waiting for something to brush against it so it can shoot sparks."
• "After my brother died, everything fell apart. It was like that trial had ripped off the outside layer of skin, and what was left of my family was just a lot of blood and guts with nothing to hold it together anymore."
• "Anger ... is a renewable source of fuel."
• "This is what it feels like to beat someone up: like a rubber band stretched so tight it aches, and starts to shake. And then, when you throw that punch, when you let go of the elastic, the snap is electric. You're on fire, and you didn't even realize you were combustible."
• "I smile. But like anything you wear that doesn't fit, it pinches."
• "The words have gotten so ordinary in fact that they feel like rain; I hardly even notice them anymore."
• "The reason we lose people we care about is so we're more grateful for the ones we still have. It's the only possible explanation. Otherwise, God's a sorry son of a bitch."
• "It is remarkable how events and truths can be reshaped, like wax that's sat too long in the sun. There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in any given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story."

October 2019; 500 pages