Book Review: Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

High School Shootings in Picoult’s Fourteenth Novel

Nov 2, 2008 Elizabeth Gregory

Can anything justify cold-blooded murder? Picoult's brave novel looks at the motivations behind a high school shooting.

Peter Houghton is seventeen years old when he enters Sterling High, armed with four loaded guns, and proceeds to shoot ten people and injure many more. The whole episode takes just nineteen minutes.

Picoult’s premise, however, is that rather than just a few minutes, the violent shootings have perhaps taken a period of many years to come about. The narrative structure of the novel jumps between present day – showing us the event itself, its immediate aftermath, and the long trial that ultimately decides Peter’s fate – and episodes from the past. These show the reader a very different side to Peter Houghton, a shy, quiet and sensitive boy who has been bullied ever since his Superman lunchbox was thrown from the bus on his very first day of school.

Josie and Alex Cormier

Nor is the novel simply about Peter. His former childhood friend Josie, whose boyfriend Matt is killed during the shootings, plays a key role, as does her mother Alex. Josie cannot at first remember anything about what happened the day she was found unconscious in a shower room with Matt’s body, and Alex struggles to comfort her daughter through such a traumatic event whilst remaining as impartial as possible – she is to be the judge presiding over the case when it goes to trial.

Is Lacy Houghton to Blame?

Perhaps the most sympathetic character, however, is Lacy Houghton. At first disbelieving, she must learn to cope with seeing her youngest son branded a cold-blooded killer, her only contact with him a weekly prison visit. She combs the past for clues, seeking confirmation from Peter’s childhood that surely, this couldn’t be her fault – could it?

Picoult’s novel is compelling and well-written, keeping the reader’s attention to the very end by the dropping of well placed clues suggesting that not all is as it seems. Her real triumph, however, is her avoidance of a convenient division between good and bad – many of Peter’s victims are shown through flashbacks to the past to have been unpleasant characters, particularly in their treatment of the boy who later kills them. Peter himself is a mass of contradictions: initially an unsympathetic character, the reader becomes more drawn to him the more they learn about his past – and yet the fact remains that the novel has opened with murder of innocent children.

By the end of the novel, Peter’s fate hangs in the balance, as his lawyer Jordan McAfee (familiar to regular Picoult readers from The Pact and Salem Falls) attempts to convince the court that Peter is as much a victim as those whose bodies were recovered from Sterling School.

Success of Nineteen Minutes

Picoult has long had a large and loyal readership, but Nineteen Minutes was her first release to debut at number one on the New York Times Bestseller List, suggesting that she has written about a contemporary issue that has become an increasing concern for society. In this brave book she offers no answers, but has the courage to show there are always two sides to every story.

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult is published in paperback in the UK by Hodder (2007), 571 pages, ISBN 978-0-340-93579-8.

The copyright of the article Book Review: Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes in American Fiction is owned by Elizabeth Gregory. Permission to republish Book Review: Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Cover of Nineteen Minutes