Last year during one of our BIPOC ERG sessions, someone recommended Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things. Picoult is generally not an author I gravitated towards, but when I saw this book at the thrift store for $1.99, I figured I might as well pick it up. I kind of regret it.
When I say this book left me reeling, it’s an understatement. There was a lot to digest and it wasn’t always palatable for reasons I’ll get into below, but first let’s start with what this book is about.
Ruth Jefferson is a Labour and Delivery nurse with more than 20 years of experience. She starts her day with a routine examination of a newborn, but she can sense that something is wrong. A few minutes later, she is told that she is assigned to a different patient. As it turns out, the parents are white supremacists and they do not want a Black nurse caring for their child. The hospital complies and Ruth is formally removed from the child’s care. Suddenly the baby goes into cardiac arrest and Ruth is the only nurse available to attend to the baby. Does she intervene as her job demands or does she obey the strict orders she’s been given?
A moment’s hesitation has a colossal ripple effect. Ruth’s life is flipped upside down as she is charged with a serious crime. The rest of the book concerns the trial as Ruth and her family struggle through it all.
Small Great Things is told from multiple points of view. Ruth, of course, is at the center. We are in her shoes for that pivotal moment in the hospital and so we never have any doubts about her state of mind. Interspersed with Ruth there’s Kennedy – the white defence lawyer who feels compelled to take the case for seemingly genuine but self-serving reasons. The last character we get to step into the shoes of is Turk Bauer – the white supremacist father. You’re meant to hate Turk, obviously, but I really struggled reading from Turk’s perspective because it was so vile. His reminiscing over the terrible acts of violence he proudly committed was difficult to stomach. I didn’t feel the need to see from his perspective since there’s already so much of this hatred permeating our day-to-day anyway (I will concede that this was perhaps less prevalent in 2016 when the book was first published). While I understand why it was done, but found myself skipping through these chapters as real life is traumatic enough.
At the end of this book, there is a dedicated Q&A led by Celeste Ng where Picoult recounts her decision to write this book and who it was for. As a white woman witnessing the disturbing events playing out in broad daylight, she felt compelled to do something. Aware of her who exactly her demographic was, she decided to write a story. She shares how much research she did before writing speaking with Black women and former white supremacists to get the details right. Although her efforts seemed genuine, her characters seemed really inauthentic.
Ruth, for example, uses two very cliché stories while trying to explain the Black experience to her white lawyer Kennedy. She takes Kennedy shopping with her to show how she is scrutinized by the employees and followed by management. Another time, they are in Kennedy’s kitchen when Ruth snaps at her over flesh-coloured band-aids. While these are by no means outdated experiences, they did very much feel like “black-people bingo” as noted by Roxanne Gay in her review.
In 2017 it was reported that Viola Davis and Julia Roberts were set to star in this adaptation. It looks like the project never really got off the ground, but I could just not see how Viola could attach herself to this project without some serious rewrites. Especially after she was so vocal about her regrets over The Help.
Kennedy of course is also problematic. She is your left-leaning white woman who doesn’t realize she’s racist and has microaggressions tumbling out of her mouth every two seconds. She is averse to bringing up race during the trial, yet by the end, she sees the light and does her best iteration of A Time to Kill’s closing speech.
Then of course there’s “the twist” with the white supremacist that had my eyes rolling so far back, that I could see through all of space and time. It seemed incredibly unnecessary, and again completely cliché. Roxanne may have said she understands why it needed to happen, but I don’t. If you’ve read the book, please explain.
While this book wasn’t terrible, I just don’t think it was written for me. I was happy to take it back right where I found it once I was finished. Hopefully, it’ll be enjoyed by its next reader a little better.
Elexciss 