Nineteen Minutes

This week on my commute, I finished listening to the audiobook of Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes. It didn't end quite the way I had predicted, and I thought my ending would have been a little better. Still, it was mostly predictable. After you've read a few Picoult novels, you get an idea of what to expect. She takes a controversial topic, thinks up a "what-if" plot, and then winds up some characters of the right age and puts them into it. This works better for some topics than for others. I thought it worked for The Ninth Circle and The Pact better than it did for Plain Truth and My Sister's Keeper. It works pretty well for Nineteen Minutes.

Something most people don't think about when they think about a school shooting is what the mother of the shooter feels like. The plot of Nineteen Minutes is entwined with the story of Lacey, the mother of Peter, who shot and killed ten people at his high school, and also with the story of Alex, a judge (for a while you think she's going to end up the judge on the case, but then she is forced to recuse herself). Alex's daughter, Josie, was best friends with Peter up until they reached middle school, and one of the mysteries of the way the novel switches back and forth between past and present is whether she reverted to her old habit of protecting Peter, or her new habit of disavowing him. Unfortunately, it's not a mystery why Peter ends up the way he does. It was almost as painful to listen to the scene when Lacey races to the high school to find out if Peter is safe and finds out that he's the one shooting as to listen to the one in first grade, when Lacey tells Peter that the next time a bully picks on him, he has to fight back "or else I will punish you." Aaaa! Can I invent a new word here: "overforeshadowing"?

Actually, though, Lacey is not a bad mother. She was acting on the advice of a teacher when she tried to force Peter to fight back, and most of her "sins" are sins of omission. When she does try to protect Peter, it's too late. I cringed along with Peter when she helped goad Peter into going out for middle-school soccer and then told the coach that he should let Peter play, rather than sit on the bench. The scariest thing, for me, about sympathizing with Lacey's good motives was thinking about how little of my teenagers' lives I know much about. I mean, I think it's normal when one of my kids isn't listening. Half the time she's got earbuds in, or he's reading. But Lacey thought it was normal too, and then her son turns out to be, well, a homicidal maniac. Except, of course, it's not really that simple. He was a sweet and sensitive boy who was bullied all his life and who finally lashed out, in what his lawyer says was "post-traumatic stress disorder." Okay, well.

When questioned about the fictional high school's "no tolerance" policy on bullying, the principal says "if the administration intervenes, it makes it worse for the kid who's being bullied." While I can't even imagine some of the incidents that the administrators at my kids' middle and high school have to handle, I do know that all kids in public school in the U.S. have at least one or two experiences of physical and/or verbal lashing-out from other kids, and usually teachers or other supervisors don't see it and don't hear about it. Most of the kids work it out. I spent a couple of weeks in the elementary school my kids attended when my daughter broke both her arms during fourth grade, mostly helping her write and eat her lunch. I watched on the playground. One day I told one particular bully that I was watching him, and he left off with the under-the-breath-taunts of smaller boys for a while.

The experience of listening to Nineteen Minutes was long and drawn-out and made me worry about little things, like Walker losing his lunch box. Because Peter kept "losing" his lunch box when bullies would take it from him and throw it out a bus window, or something. My best response to finishing the audiobook (besides taking it back to the library and resolving not to listen to that kind of thing in the car again, but to check out a paperback that I can read at my much faster pace if I feel the need) is to once again think of Buckaroo Banzai, standing in front of a girl crying trails of black mascara down her face and admonishing the crowd: "don't be mean. We don't have to be mean." I think of that scene a lot.

In fact, odd as it may seem, Buckaroo Banzai saying those words is one of my internal monitors for behavior. Every once in a while, he pops up and says them to me. Because sometimes I get mean, and I need to back off. Eleanor says that when her conscience speaks to her, it speaks in the voice of her sixth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Murphy. Do you have a voice that speaks to you or keeps you on the right path?