VANISHING ACTS
By Jodi Picoult. Atria. 418 pp. $25
Here's what I like about Jodi Picoult as a fiction writer: She likes children and treats them with a respect seldom seen in contemporary fiction, she is willing to take on big issues, and she has a sense of language and image that transcends the romance genre her books inhabit. All of this might work well together if only she took the time to decide what to use and what to toss away. In her most recent book, Vanishing Acts, there is no evidence of an editor anywhere, not even a whiff.
Picoult writes bestsellers for twentysomething and thirtysomething women who have cut their teeth on daytime TV, at least in terms of their expectations of story and character. Picoult caters to that sensibility -- the anti-book is her readers' ideal, stock characters are what they expect and clamor for. She simultaneously attempts to lead readers out of that box and into another place, one whose atmosphere lets them feel that they are co-writers with their idol, that they are brighter than romance genre writers take them to be, better people, more engaged with issues and, most notably, also correct in whatever answer they arrive at on any issue. When it comes to Big Issues, Picoult settles for a facile subjectivity and equivocation. Her Web site offers her readers a cozy community, which she unabashedly calls the "Pi-Cult." She has told an interviewer that what she likes best about her work is the fans: A wanh-wanh siren goes off here. When fans become the driving force, a fiction writer's deeper wells shut down, and the loss is the reader's. Yeah, I know: Lighten up, reviewer-lady. If I did not see Picoult as striving earnestly to do more, yet flinching from challenging her reader-base, I'd zip my lip.
Each of Vanishing Acts' 10 major sections is preceded by an aphorism or snippet of text -- from Baudelaire to Quintilian to Nabokov to Nietzsche -- suggesting noble enterprise. But there is a jarring discrepancy between the grand reach of these epigraphs and the daytime-TV tone of the text, in which broad brushstrokes prompt the reader to summon stock characters.
We are introduced to Delia Hopkins, a single mom who tells us that she makes her living finding missing persons with the aid of her able bloodhound, Greta. Makes her living? We doubt it. Greta is about as convincing as Clifford the Big Red Dog, and as subtle. Delia's father, Andrew Hopkins, runs the local senior citizens' center. Her alcoholic erstwhile boyfriend, Eric, is an attorney. (The law is a profession for which Picoult displays near-worship in several of her novels.) Delia and Eric's lifelong friend Fitz, into bed with whom Delia languorously falls in the course of the story, replicating her own mother's confused erotic history, is a journalist. Delia's daughter by Eric, Sophie, is as much a person as any other character. Her name, of course, suggests wisdom, which is not in great supply in any other corner.
We are dropped almost immediately into Plot: Out of nowhere come the cops to arrest Andrew, who turns out to be not really Andrew at all, as Delia is not really Delia. In fact, in the disjunct puzzlemeister mode lately resurrected by the likes of The Da Vinci Code, it turns out that we are dealing not with real names but with anagrams that draw too much attention to themselves. We're also treated to an excursion into Native American witchcraft, an eccentric character who concocts and sells dolls with names like One-Night Stand Barbie and Rohypnol Ken, a suicide leap in costume from a cliff. Picoult is not writing zany self-parody here, just local color, and readers are meant to find it as straight-facedly intriguing as she obviously does, whether it's integrated into the plot line or not. She succumbs to the danger of a perceived need to use all her research, resulting in a patchwork of unrelatable scraps.
This is all distraction, diversion, multiple ways not to deal with the difficult big issues that Picoult seems to have thought she would deal with here -- repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse -- but then simply blurted out in a rush and left the stage. That core problem is heightened by the casual use of unrefuted statistics on what deniers call False Memory Syndrome. In the only instance in which she does not equivocate, she seems to want to wipe out with one blow the debate itself. The subject she thought she would tackle, she hasn't even begun to approach.
In Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult has written her 12th novel in nearly as many years. It might seem curmudgeonly to suggest that a respite, a time of lying fallow, is in order. This novel has all the earmarks of a well-meaning, efficient assembly line. Picoult's books reach out beyond the confines of genre to challenge her readers -- just not too seriously, thus undercutting her own enterprise. Picoult says she does not write for reviewers. If, however, she writes for those adoring fans whom she seems to want to lift into literature, she hasn't done it here. Maybe a time-out would help? •
Ingrid Hill is the author of the novel "Ursula, Under."
