Harbinger of Vengeance and Death

The brilliant, neon colored hopes of youth. The risks, the dares, the soaring hopes are so boundless, so natural, so easily destroyed. Yes, Virginia, life isn’t fair and although the dingy cloak of maturity hides the inner child and that raging voice, we all secretly know the truth behind the world and the way it works: it’s never fair. But for some broken souls, some abused innocents, this secret knowledge and reluctant acceptance cannot come because long before their minds have had a chance to mature, their souls have died. Their hopes are dead and buried. Now is the end, let them rest in peace. This is the case for Peter Houghton, abused by his peers from his earliest memories, verbally assaulted and physically punished; Peter is a weak child who cannot fight back, a lone individual in a sea of carbon copies, an innocent sheep surrounded by a pack of baying wolves. With his blood, with his entire soul, he has been made to pay. Victor Frankenstein made the monster and now it has returned only this time the modern rendition of a monster is less monstrous and more pitiful. Peter returns to the grave of his hopes, a grave called school that he has been buried in for years, but this time dead dreams have arisen demanding justice and just before he watches hope wing its way into the ethereal beyond, Peter pulls out the gun and decides to make them all pay. In nineteen minutes, Peter will have the upper hand. In nineteen minutes they will learn to respect the person they gleefully trampled on earlier. Vengeance is his, but only for nineteen minutes.

But what of the flipside? What about Peter’s former friend turned betrayer who left his side to join the “popular crowd?” Josie has long felt the stabbing of guilt as she watches and participates in the destruction of her friend. But, once again, life isn’t fair and her situation is complicated. Why leave the ivory tower to mill around with the starving peasants? Survival of the fittest is justified because, in the end, if you don’t look out for number one, then who will? But, on that fateful day, Josie saw something and now she knows something. Will she risk everything to reveal what really happened when Peter’s trial begins?

And what about Josie’s mother, the austere Judge Alex Cormier? What of her judicial detachment? All these years she has loved her child, but has she ever really known her? Ever really tried? And what of Peter’s parents? Where did they fall short? What did they say or do wrong or, more terrifyingly, what did they not say or do that could have stopped it all, had they only known? Is there truly a black and white or is the world tinted gray? Who was the victim and who was the villain? Is there ever really any true answer or is it all summed up in one brief phrase of childhood, “it’s not fair!”


Jodi Picoult once again weaves together a thought provoking tale leading the reader down a path of analysis and introspection that, in the end, produces no answers but only more questions. Through her characters we are plunged into an alien world, swimming blindly in a sea of sympathy and emotion with that ever haunting chant playing relentlessly in the background: what would I do? What would you do if you were bullied from pre-school onward? Would you look at it wisely and realize that someday life will get better or would you snap suddenly, viciously, irrevocably and become the monster you hated? Would you desert a friend to attain your dreams? Would you sacrifice another for your own benefit? What if your child was killed in a shooting? What if your son was the murderer? Questions, never ending, all painful, but nevertheless, questions that pierce that dulled layer of cynicism that protects the brain from things we don’t want to think about and makes us ask, finally, what would we do and what, from the outside, is the right thing to do? Even if something is technically, legally right, does that make it right in our hearts? And what if something is morally wrong, can we really, truthfully punish the sinner when we push him to the sin? Think about it.

The interwoven moral complexities of the novel are complimented and brought to life by the characters’ personalities, actions, and various stations in the tragedy. All characters are an island of humanity in and of themselves representing the good and evil that lurks in us all. Picoult shifts effortlessly allowing each character a voice, an opinion, no matter how greatly that outlook differs from the opinion stated before it. The author remains objective allowing the characters to become an entity of their very own, just as vulnerable and unpredictable as we are, each representing a segment of people and their outlook, each a grand moral statement left to the reader’s interpretation. The only con, the only reason for pause in an otherwise seamless characterization strategy is that, in representing humanity and the unfairness people can show toward one another, Picoult creates some main “protagonists” that I found unsympathetic, namely Josie, because, while well portrayed, her never failing selfishness made the reader raise an eyebrow at her teenage oh-so-deep sorrow when in reality her self induced pity party was at a heavy expense to others. Nevertheless, to make readers love and hate characters, while always understanding them and picking up on the underlying moral was a grand accomplishment making the characterization of this novel 5 star all the way, even if the reader does take a personal dislike to some characters.

Nineteen Minutes was an exceptionally lengthy read, weighing in at 455 pages. However, the novel successfully managed to keep the reader’s adamant attention and curiosity at full steam throughout the duration never once allowing a captive audience to succumb to the needs of the real world --- such as sleeping and eating. The tale, while slowly paced, was fraught with passages of introspection and deep thought continually goading the reader’s conscious and warning that an instant judgment of a character or a situation may not be an accurate judgment. The story was peppered with these scenes and when not engaging the conscious, Picoult chooses to engage the inner detective slowing giving the readers’ morsels of the truth, making them beg for more, entertaining the real possibilities of what lay ahead, trying to out guess an author full of surprises. The conclusion blows all the readers’ carefully structured hypotheses away and reveals a grand, complex plot that has been long in the brewing, but is ever so satisfying. Definitely an ending that will make the girls reach for the tissues and the guys suddenly feel a need to leave the room.

The literary style employed by the author was two pronged relying on both verbal dialogue and a dialogue of the mind using the characters themselves as the narrators, allowing each one a specific voice, tone, and style that was unique to him or her, but never loosing track of the author’s own flowery voice. Through the use of metaphoric introspection and other devices of comparison, Picoult’s writing style acquires a life and beauty of its own making it of equal importance to the plot and the characterization.

The only fly in an otherwise perfect ointment is the ceaseless use of retrospection in unwinding the truth behind the tragedy. The author has created her own literary time machine bouncing back and forth between infancy and the time of the shooting with an almost startling randomness causing the reader to loose all sense of time in relation to the tale. While the reader is able to discern which recollections are pre-shooting and during the shooting, other events cannot be so well categorized. This can give the novel an almost sloppy feel at times, making the drama seem even more slowly paced than it really was. However, the fault was soon diminished by the other elements of the tale making it a small blemish in an otherwise smooth narration.

Conclusion:

Even after the last page rustles into place, Nineteen Minutes remains in the reader’s mind. The characters, who have now become family, wave goodbye and the reader cannot help but utter a final farewell, wishing that one could know more about their lives and the future effects of their trauma. We wish them well, we love them and we fear what they have unwittingly taught us about the unfairness of the world and the ugliness that is inherent within ourselves. This is a tale that both young and old can relate to as we have all been the victim and the villain at one point during our lives and we are all still trying to recover from what happened to us in school. For this reason, the novel is worthy of five stars despite a few minor blemishes because it makes the reader think and awakens a languishing beast called compassion. Life isn’t fair, people aren’t fair, but in the end, we can’t hold it against them because are we any better? Let he who hath not sinned, cast the first stone.

Countess_Eva