Jodi Picoult: Perfect match

By MICHELE HEWITSON

This is the sort of prescience that puts a large grin on the face of a publisher: Jodi Picoult's new novel about a child abuser priest hits the shelves just as the horror stories about the extent of abuse covered up by the Catholic Church hits the news stands.

In Perfect Match, district attorney Nina Frost's son Nathaniel has been sexually abused. The family priest is charged. Rather oddly, Nina doesn't trust the courts to deliver justice. And she has seen first hand how traumatic a court case can be for an abused child. So when the priest makes his first appearance in court, Nina shoots him.

It doesn't give anything away to say so. We're told in the prologue that Nina reaches into her handbag, finds the gun lurking amid the debris of a working mum and "shoots him four times in quick succession ... at this moment she would not have recognised herself."

Really? This is a woman who wanted to become a prosecutor so that "I had the chance to rid the planet of evil." It "never entered my mind to be a defence attorney standing up and lying on behalf of a morally depraved criminal and, as far as I was concerned most of them were guilty until proven innocent." The priest she shoots and kills has yet to be proven guilty.

Readers of Picoult's fiction will recognise that we're back in the land of moral dilemma. She specialises in ordinary characters struggling with everyday dilemmas in small-town America, then places them in a situation which will require them to question all that they thought they held dear. Picoult's plots are played out in the courtroom. As in real courtroom dramas, the real story - of how Picoult's unlikely characters find themselves facing up to the truth as told by lawyers - has happened outside the room.

Frost's actions will set in train a process through which Picoult will challenge her readers to attempt some analysis of right and wrong.

Is it ever right to take a life in revenge for loss of innocence? Should a husband support a wife for doing so? Can a wife be both a high-powered attorney and a committed mother? And, the aspect of the book which forces family values down your throat: is keeping the family together more important than true love?

The questions she poses are, I suppose, valid enough in a simplistic, black and white way.

But the big question turns out to be: is it ever right to manipulate readers to the extent that Picoult does in Perfect Match?

That works of fiction (and non-fiction) manipulate the reader's emotions is part of the game. But the characters in Perfect Match are not developed well enough to allow us to form a relationship with them which would allow us to care about the answers.

So Picoult resorts to cheap emotional tricks to get us to play. She piles on the cutesy kid stuff, the little hokey touches - "clasped together, our hands look like a heart"; "when Heaven breaks, who fixes it?" - the beatification of motherhood.

It is all so insultingly manipulative that by the nonsensical and Oprah-esque closing statement - "the only way to be forgiven is to find someone who is willing to forgive" - I would willingly have seen the whole cast locked up for life.

Allen & Unwin, $35

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald features writer.