I come bearing terrible news. Jodi Picoult, the popular ultra-melodramatic novelist, has discovered Asperger's Syndrome. Her
newest novel, House Rules, is about a family in which the 18-year-old son, Jacob, is an Asperger's autistic and ends up being suspected of murder. By the sounds of it, it has all the makings of a typical Picoult book: legal drama, family drama, ableism.
[NOTE: The following post contains some spoilers for Jodi Picoult novels, particularly
My Sister's Keeper and
Handle With Care.]
I admit, with some embarrassment, at having read several Picoult novels. You can criticize Picoult's sappy prose and contrived plots all day, and you'd be right. But the woman does have a knack for producing long stories that make you want to read more. I have to give her that. But now that she's turned her tragedy-efying gaze to autism, I'm just pissed.
In that, I guess I now know something about how people with leukemia (past or present) and osteogenesis imperfetta felt about Picoult's previous books.
My Sister's Keeper, the book which put Picoult on the literary map, riveted audiences--including me, I have to admit--in its fascinating explorations of a modern-day ethical conundrum: is it okay for parents to use genetic selection to have a child who is a perfect match for an already-existing child whose life depends on it? And when it comes to one child donating blood, platelets, bone marrow, and organs to the other, what are the donor child's rights? How much is too much? This question in and of itself is not necessarily ableist, in my opinion, but in Picoult's hands it becomes so. The book is full of content which basically states that the life of someone with difficult-to-treat leukemia isn't worth living. It's offensive. It's ableist. And one tell-tale sign of its ableism is Picoult's failure to give the character with disabilities a voice until the very end of the book. Kate is an object of pity, an object which makes her family member's lives more difficult, but she herself is denied a voice--except to say that she doesn't want to live anymore. (Yes, yes, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but not much of one.)
In
Handle With Care, Picoult ratchets up the ableism to another level. The novel deals with the question of wrongful birth lawsuits--lawsuits in which parents of a disabled child sue their obstetricians for failure to prenatally diagnose the disability. The whole premise of such lawsuits is that the birth of the disabled child is "wrongful"--that parents would have aborted said child if they'd known about the disability. Picoult takes the question of whether it's ethically acceptable for parents to bring a wrongful birth suit--a question with a self-evident answer, if you ask me--and turns it into a huge ethical drama. We get hundreds of pages which amount to a dramatized discussion of the value of the life of someone with OI. And, as in
My Sister's Keeper, the actual character with a disability (Willow) is rendered as an object of pity and philosophical debate. She herself has no real voice--until the end of the book, in which she narrates as she drowns herself in what may or may not be intentional suicide. I only wish I was kidding about this. Picoult is characteristically ambiguous, and I admit that it's certainly possible to interpret the ending as a tragic but natural response to the ableism of a wrongful birth suit. But this is by no means clear in the narrative. Picoult's method of "showing both sides" on these ethical issues amounts to moral cowardice and ableism in this instance.
If I had the time and inclination, I could no doubt continue to explain why these books are so problematic from a disability-rights standpoint. In fact, I had thought about writing a blog entry about
Handle with Care when I first read it almost a year ago. That my anti-Picoult energies have been most forcibly stirred by Picoult taking on autism/Asperger's is, I'm afraid, a sign of my own empathic failures (though not in a Simon Baron-Cohen-type way). I want to make clear the fact that the ableism against people with OI in
Handle with Care is no less despicable than the forthcoming ableism against autistics in this new book.
House Rules, worryingly, looks to be a continuation of the pattern of ableism in Picoult's ever-popular novels.
While some people may criticize me for assuming the worst of
House Rules, I would point out that Picoult's record on disability-issues doesn't make me terribly inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. And in any case, Picoult (or her marketing team) have kindly made an
excerpt of the book available on her website, so that I can comment on it without buying it. (Indeed, the book is not out until next month.)
From what I can tell,
House Rules may very well be better than its predecessors in giving voice to the character with disabilities. The autistic character, Jacob, seems to be getting considerably more narration time than Willow or Kate got. Unfortunately, it seems as though we might have to be worried that Jacob, like too many other autistic fictional characters, is a laundry list of
every single autistic trait instead of an actually developed human being. (Let's be clear:
no one has every single autistic trait, partially because some traits are mutually exclusive.)
House Rules may well end up to be better on this count than
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but perhaps not. It's not a terribly high standard, at any rate, and all of this is an outsider's view of autism. Which won't stop everyone I tell my diagnosis to from now on from comparing me to Jacob, of course.
Grr.
Based on the excerpt itself and
a review, it seems as though Picoult will be taking on all of the controversial issues of the autism world, including whether Asperger's is autism and possibly the whole cure question. It also seems as though the story, unsurprisingly, largely revolves around how the poor non-autistic family members have to deal with the terrible burden of having an autistic relative. Sigh.
I submit this excerpts as disturbing examples of the ableism which is very likely present in the entire book:
The mother:
In my mind, Asperger’s isn’t a label to describe the traits Jacob has, but rather the ones he lost. It was sometime around two years old when he began to drop words, to stop making eye contact, to avoid connections with people. He couldn’t hear us, or he didn’t want to. One day I looked at him, lying on the floor beside a Tonka truck. He was spinning its wheels, his face only inches away; and I thought, Where have you gone?
The brother:
I have twenty-four stitches on my face, thanks to my brother. Ten of them cut through my left eyebrow, thanks to the time that Jacob knocked over my high chair when I was eight months old. The other fourteen are on my chin, from Christmas 2003, when I got so excited about some stupid gift that I crumpled the wrapping paper, and Jacob went ballistic at the sound. The reason I’m telling you this has nothing to do with my brother, though. It’s because my mother will tell you Jacob’s not violent, but I am living proof that she’s kidding herself.
Jacob himself:
I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome long before it became the mental-health-disorder-du-jour, overused by parents to describe their bratty kids so that people think they’re supergeniuses instead of simply antisocial.
[...]
At different times, the media has posthumously diagnosed certain famous people with Asperger’s. Here is just a sampling:
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Albert Einstein
- Andy Warhol
- Jane Austen
- Thomas Jefferson
I am ninety-nine percent sure not a single one of them had a meltdown in a grocery store and wound up breaking a whole shelf of relish and pickle jars.
I think I've made it pretty clear on this blog that I'm not a fan of historical diagnosing, but this excerpt opposes it for all of the wrong reasons. Because you couldn't possibly be autistic and a great artist/scientist/statesmen. (And also, I'm pretty sure that one reason why Mozart, Einstein, Austen, and Jefferson never had a grocery store meltdown is because
there was no such thing as grocery stores when they were alive.)
Ms. Picoult, I'm one of those demon autistic children whose had meltdowns in grocery stores (and other places, too). But now that I know I'm autistic, I don't think of myself as defective for it, and I don't think I'm unique in this regard.
You may consider us defective for our oddities--oh, excuse me, "symptoms"--but
we do not.
If this excerpt is any indication of what
House Rules has in store for us, I am seriously concerned. With the combination of Picoult and autism, the book is virtually guaranteed to be a best-seller, blighting my vision when I enter Barnes & Noble for months to come.
Also, I want to stop myself from actually buying it. I say this with my head hanging in shame.