Small Great Things

The Unfairness Of It 

  

 This book is not hot off the press, but better read late than never.  Jodi Picoult’s brilliant novel takes its title from the Martin Luther King Jr. quote, “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.”

Small Great Things confronts racism head on, even the hidden prejudices often ignored by those who think they are not racist like those Neo-Nazi skinheads. The white lawyer who takes up the case of a black woman wrongly accused, never noticed that when she exits a store, she is not searched, but her client bags are always examined. The implication being that black people are more likely to be shoplifters.

The protagonist, Ruth Jefferson, the daughter of a maid who worked all her life for a white family, believes she has risen above her race and social status when she studies hard to become a labor and delivery nurse. She is proud of her efficiency and never questions why there are no other black nurses at the hospital where she works.

Ruth’s husband was killed while serving in Afghanistan, but she sees to it that her son, Edison, goes to college and concentrates on his studies. They live in a white area of Connecticut and Ruth is sure she earned the privilege of equality by the sheer dint of her education and achievements. But the edifice she has built for herself and Edison proves to be fragile.  First white supremacists Turk and Brittany Bauer refuse to allow Ruth to touch their newborn son, and the hospital agrees. Ruth is hurt and shocked, but worse is to come. When as per orders, she hesitates just for a moment in looking after the infant, he dies. The angry parents accuse Ruth of murder. She is arrested and dragged from her home in her night clothes, like a common criminal and her home trashed by vindictive white cops.

Ruth cannot afford to hire a lawyer so she is assigned a public attorney, Kennedy, an earnest and well-meaning white woman, who, till she takes up Ruth’s case, never realised how deep racism runs in America. Ruth herself balks at taking the support offered by a black power group, but when she is increasingly isolated, it is a kind of solace to know that somebody cares—even if they are media-baiting strangers.

Turk Bauer is a total creep, who hates blacks because brother was killed in an accident involving an African American driver.  He joins a white power group and turns into a hardliner. But his grief over the death of his son and the fear of losing his wife are genuine. Picoult does not discriminate between black emotions and white.

Small Great Things tends to be too preachy, sags after a point and has an overly melodramatic climax. But it is an important novel in a continuing dialogue about contentious race relations in the US.

Small Great Things

By Jodi Picoult

Publisher: Ballantine

Pages: 480

3 Books by Clare Mackintosh

A Cop’s Eye View

Clare Mackintosh quit the police force to make a career as a successful writer of crime fiction. Her latest Let Me Lie, is not as engrossing as her last, I Let You Go, but it sets up an intriguing premise.

Successful car dealer, Tom Johnson, suddenly drowns himself at the town’s suicide point of Beachy Head, making sure his body stays underwater by carrying a bag full of rocks. Seven months later, his wife, Caroline, commits a copycat suicide by throwing herself into the water at the same spot in the same way. Their daughter, Anna, is devastated and is helped in trying to overcome her grief by her counsellor boyfriend Mark, uncle Billy, friend Laura (who was also her mother’s goddaughter) and her infant daughter Ella.

On the first anniversary of her mother’s suicide,  Anna gets a card that says, “Suicide? Think Again” and her life starts unravelling. She now believes her mother was murdered, and possibly her father too. Murray Mackenzie, the cop who meets her at the police station, is retired and working as a civilian volunteer.  Even though an anonymous card is not enough to prove foul play, his instinct tells him that there is more to the Johnson couple’s suicides than the police officers on duty noted.

On his own time, and defying warnings from the chief, he starts investigating the case. Mackintosh has given Murray more attention than the whiny and quite unappealing Anna, who at twenty-six, cannot get a grip on herself. Murray cares with great tenderness with his wife, Sarah, who suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, and is in and out of a mental asylum. But when she is relatively normal, Murray discusses his cases with her and she often sees what others have missed. The novel could have easily been about Murray than Anna, who does not contribute much to the story, except bouts of hysteria.

The book kicks to life halfway through, and then races towards an unpredictable climax, but the reader has to stay patient, and hope the author will add some twists... which she does. Maybe a little too late.

Let Me Lie

By Clare Mackintosh 

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 400

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Clare Mackintosh’s second book, a psychological thriller, I See You, was a bestseller. It is so scary because it could be true, and happen to any woman who commutes to work. The very idea of being scrutinised by an invisible stranger is creepy.

While taking a train to work, most women read, listen to music or doze off; hardly any suspects that she is being stalked and that too remotely. Zoe Walker, a forty-ish mother of two teenage kids, is on her way home from work, when she turns the pages of a newspaper and finds her own picture staring out of a ‘Personal’ ad that lists a website called findtheone.com.

Her family—live-in boyfriend, Simon, and kids—convince her that it must be a lookalike. Then, she sees the photo of another woman in a similar ad and when she is found murdered, Zoe calls the police. The only one who takes her seriously is Kelly Swift, a detective who is suffering a punishment posting in the transport department for the crime of hitting a child molester during an interrogation. Kelly is unusually sensitive because her twin sister was raped when in college. The sister has chosen to forget the incident and get on with her life, but Kelly cannot get it out of her mind.

Kelly wheedles her way into this investigation and when she and Zoe start digging into the strange website, they uncover something too shocking to believe—that someone sells details of women’s daily commutes to subscribers on the website, so that they can stalk those women. It’s a bizarre dating tool for some men, and for the psychos an easy route to rape and murder.

Mackintosh carefully builds up back stories of Zoe and Kelly and minor characters, like Zoe’s friend Melissa, are properly fleshed out.  Quite a few red herrings are strewn about, and the sense of danger is always palpable. Zoe’s boyfriend has been lying to her, her son is weird, her daughter is dating an older man, her ex-husband, a cabbie, is still on call when she needs help and her boss is not very nice.

The suspense is nail-biting and, at a time when women are being stalked and attacked all over the world, the book is also a cautionary tale, indirectly advising women to keep a check on their surroundings during their commute to and from work, and never trust strangers.

I See You

By Clare Mackintosh

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 372

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Clare Mackintosh’s debut novel, I Let You Go, was a bestseller and award-winner, picked for TV series and had  translation rights sold to over 30 countries. For the cop-turned-writer, it was a big deal, and established her career as an author to watch for, and her next two books did not disappoint.

The book’s opening scene grabs the reader by the collar and never loosens that grip.  At Christmastime in Bristol, a  hit-and-run accident kills a five-year-old boy named Jacob, who, just for a moment, let go of his mother’s hand. His mother looks on in horror and later, is unable to note the car’s number or any other details.

Detective Inspector Ray Stevens, who is in charge of the case is angered by the callousness of the driver who knocked down a child and did not even stop to help. It does not make it easier for them, when the mother of the child vanishes without a trace, probably traumatised by the death of her child and the hate spewed on social media accusing her of being a bad mom.

The cops get quite a public battering for not being able to trace the car and arrest the driver. The efforts of Ray and his deputies to keep the case open when the absence of any leads gets them an order to save expenses and close the file, are interspersed with the story of Jenna Gray, who leaves home after the accident and is haunted by it. She goes to a remote coastal village of Penfach to rebuild her life in anonymity.

She befriends the owner of a trailer park, adopts a stray dog and starts dating a kindly veterinarian. She also makes a career of sorts, drawing messages in the sand and taking photographs from a cliff, for tourists looking for keepsakes. But she keeps her past sealed off from her new friends and does not want to return to the city.

Jenna is not who she says she is and has a shocking connection to the accident that killed little Jacob. When the cops land at her door, Jenna’s troubled life is laid bare.

Mackintosh knows just how to layer the suspense, time the twists and keep the reader on tenterhooks.  With this novel, she joined the ranks of popular crime novelists.

I Let You Go

By Clare Mackintosh

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 387

The Immortalists

When Death Knocks

The lives of four Gold siblings are altered when they find out when they are going to die. Does this knowledge become a self-fulfilling prophecy? That is the question Cloe Benjamin’s fascinating new novel, The Immortalists, tries to answer.

One summer in 1969, bored and bothered by the sticky heat, Varya, Daniel, Klara and Daniel Gold, go to meet a fortuneteller or “rishika” as their Indian friend Rubina calls her. The strange-looking and spooky gypsy woman tells them all the date of their death. They do not tell the others, and profess not to care, but the secret they keep in their minds affects them more than they realise.

Benjamin then follows the lives of all four, who seem to carry a cloud of darkness around them. The youngest, Simon, knows that he is going to die young, so he escapes from home, his overbearing mother, Gertie, and a dull future as the manager of his father’s tailoring establishment. He is aware that he is different, and in the homophobic society of the time, he could live freely as a gay man only in bohemian San Francisco. That is also where his sister Klara makes her way to build her career as a magician and acrobat.

Much against his mother’s wishes, he becomes a ballet dancer, promiscuous and flamboyant, till he dies of AIDS, which was just rearing its head then, and baffling the medical community that saw hundred of young men die painful and mostly lonely deaths. Simon dies on the day the psychic had predicted he would, but had he lived dangerously because of her revelation?

Klara meets an old friend Raj Chapal (an Indian connection from Dharavi, no less), who starts managing her career, and leads her to possible stardom in splashy Las Vegas. She marries him and has a daughter, but she performs dangerous feats and drowns her inexplicable despair in alcohol, pushing herself to die on the date predicted for her.

Daniel works as a military doctor, and is determined to find out why his younger siblings died; when he is suspended from his job, he gets obsessed with tracing the gypsy woman and finding out if she had indirectly been the cause of their demise. The oldest Varya, a scientist, researching longevity, knows she will  survive to ripe old age, but she also has to make those years meaningful.

Except for a section towards the end, The Immortalists, with its meticulous period research is an absorbing read. Benjamin writes with sympathy about the blighted existence of the Golds, tarnished by foreknowledge; even though their deaths were preordained, she makes each story exciting in its own way. The book seems to say that nobody can fight fate, but what if destiny’s dice were loaded unfairly?

The Immortalists

By Chloe Benjamin

Publisher: Penguin Random

Pages: 416

Every Note Played

Courage And Grace

Many would remember the Ice Bucket Challenge, which had celebrities (and others) dumping a bucket of ice and water over their heads, to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) also known as motor neurone disease. However, unvarnished facts about just what ALS is and how devastating it can be, are to be found in Lisa Genova’s Every Note Played.

Genova is the author of Still Alice that chronicled the suffering of a woman with premature dementia (made into an award-winning film, starring Julianne Moore), and how she and her family cope with it.  In the new book, also about a debilitating medical condition, a famous concert pianist is diagnosed with ALS. He loses the use of hands first, and has to give up his career. He becomes increasingly dependent on home care professionals, and after one particularly humiliating episode when he is locked out of his house and soils his clothes, he has to accept his bitter ex-wife Karina’s offer of shelter and care.

But as the disease progresses and one by one the patient’s muscles shut down, he cannot swallow, eat, speak clearly or even breathe without invasive machines. In spite of an acrimonious divorce caused by Richard’s repeated infidelity, Karina is driven by mercy to help him (no girlfriend is willing to put up with this condition of the man), but even she does not comprehend the magnitude of the sacrifice demanded of her. She can barely leave the house, her sleep is constantly interrupted by alarms from Richard’s room, she has to do every menial task for him and be alert 24X7. Their daughter Grace, who is not informed immediately of her father’s condition, is shocked into sullen silence when she comes home from college.

The characters in the book can afford the expensive gadgets and machines required to manage the disease, one cannot even imagine how a poor person could survive. Most patients live for three to five years in a state of utter helplessness—Stephen Hawking was the only exception, who lived for many years, but completely immobile..

Genova does not spare the reader the agony Richard and Karina go through and he still he wants to live. The one positive in their life is the home health aide, Bill, whose chronic cheerfulness covers his deep compassion, without which no one can do the work he does.

The book is painful to read, but also unputdownable. The raw emotions, the unflinching portrayal of a man’s decline and a test of a woman’s patience make for a book that is as terrifying as it is tragic.

Every Note Played

By Lisa Genova

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 320

In The Midst Of Winter

Healed By Love

Isabel Allende’s latest novel gets it title from an Albert Camus quote: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

This beautiful line evoking hope, and maybe love, becomes the foundation of Allende’s In The Midst Of Winter (translated by Nick Calstor and Amanda Hopkinson), about three people damaged by their past, but coping with their despair in their own way.  A freak snowstorm brings them together, and the innate decency of two of them propels the story forward.

After her powerful debut, The House Of The Sprits, Allende keeps returning to the political turmoil in Latin America, particularly Chile where she was born and witnessed Pinochet’s reign of terror. In this book, the suffering of Lucia Maraz in Chile and Evelyn Ortega in Guatemala and the chronic guilt of Richard Bowmaster caused by a personal tragedy, sit uneasily between the noir adventure that they get involved in.

Lucia is a professor who had escaped the political pogrom in Chile, and after a miserable marriage that produced a lovely daughter, she divorced her uncaring husband; she now teaches in Richard Bowmaster’s department at NYU and lives as a tenant in his dank basement. In her early sixties, Lucia still “misses sex, romance, and love. The first of these she could obtain every so often, the second was a matter of luck, and the third was a gift from the gods that would probably never happen,” Allende writes of her situation.

Her colleague and landlord, Richard, lives like a hermit and rebuffs all of Lucia’s offers of friendship and food. One day, when Brooklyn is hit by an awful snowstorm that brings the city to a halt, Richard is out driving in the snow because one of his cats is sick, when he hits the back of a car driven by Evelyn, a Guatemalan nanny, who works for a New York gangster, with false papers. Richard gives her his card so that he can pay for repairs later. However, the girl turns up his apartments, terrified and incoherent, because there is a corpse in the trunk of the car, which she was not permitted to drive in the first place. Now that car is damaged and she has seen the body, she is afraid of her boss’s wrath.

Richard is unable to understand what Evelyn is saying, so he calls Lucia to help translate. While they decide what to do, they share their stories—which is a bit of a clumsy device. Evelyn’s brothers were brutally killed and she was raped, before her grandmother makes arrangements to send her to the US, with a “coyote” or agent who helps illegal migrants cross the border to the US. Feeling sorry for her, Lucia decides they must help Evelyn by dumping the car and the body—the harebrained enterprise made easier with the snow all around, but also tough, because it is madness to get out and drive in poor visibility and biting cold.

Allende tries to blend black comedy with horrific tragedy and strong emotions, which can be disconcerting for the reader; but she also manages to somehow ennoble the crime of the characters, because of what they have been through.  Allende’s writing, even in translation, has passages of lyricism that makes this book readable, though it cannot be counted among her best.

In The Midst Of Winter

By Isabel Allende

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 336