"Nineteen Minutes"

"Nineteen Minutes"
Jodi Picoult
Artria Books, $26.95 (hardcover)




Because of the recent devastation in Blacksburg, Va., I can't decide if reading a book that delves into the why of a school shooting is more comforting — giving a window into the mind of a killer to show how it all started — or depressing — knowing that there might not be anything to stop this from ever happening again.

"Nineteen Minutes" is Jodi Picoult's 14th novel. She tells the story of the storybook town of Sterling, N.H., and how the high school and the town are devastated when one of the students goes on a shooting rampage that lasts 19 minutes and results in 10 deaths, 19 injuries and an untold number of lives changed forever.

As is Picoult's style, she focuses her story on multiple characters and their relationships with each other. There's Josie, whose single mother Alex has worked her way up to being a judge, but has failed at providing a family life for her daughter. And there's Peter, the social outcast who has never lived up to be as good as his brother Joey, even though mother Lacy has given him love and support.

Josie is like any other teenager, trying to find her niche in high school life, but perhaps only finding that the only way she fits is to pretend to be a person she is not — pretending to be the person her "friends" want her to be. She is in the popular group. Her boyfriend is a varsity hockey player. She is pretty. She is skinny. She is unhappy.

Peter and Josie used to be friends — until Josie realized that it was easier to make fun of Peter with everyone else in the school, rather than to try to defend him and be his friend. Peter drifts into the cracks of high school. And in 19 minutes, he gets revenge.

Picoult often tells her books by starting at the beginning and telling the stories by way of what is currently happening and flashbacks to other events that have affected the way things are now. Because of the nature of this story — the crime, the impending trial, the mystery of what really happened that day — it closely resembles her 1998 novel "The Pact" (the same defense lawyer and investigator even return to this novel). The past and the present meet in the final chapter, when the whole story of the crime is told. And like Chris Harte in "The Pact," we know that Peter Houghton is guilty the whole time we are reading — what we don't know is how the defense, prosecution and jury will interpret the word guilty.

But it is disturbing to think that something as insane and disheartening as a school shooting could be the logical conclusion of any turn of events. No person who is mentally stable and balanced could even consider committing any sort of destruction of that magnitude. This is where Picoult is genius. She takes topics that are difficult to talk about and gives them a story, a start for a discussion. This is how everything started, this could be the cause of all school shootings. And, like in most of her stories, she cannot give a solution because the problem is not black and white, and too many shades of gray make it impossible to come up with any sort of simple fix.

I usually have few or no complaints about Picoult's work because she ties up all the loose ends, and everything she writes has a reason that might only appear later in the book. However, this time, I found inconsistencies — most notably when she mentions a boy in the room for the prosecution's witnesses, only to have another boy talk about watching him die the day of the school shooting. And I don't know if she ran out of time or space or couldn't find the place most appropriate to put it, but there was never any reason given for why some of the students became casualties of Peter's rage.

The end of the book is unsettling. She takes less than three pages to discuss how things are one year later. And she only needs that much space because nothing has changed — the social hierarchy remains, the nerds are pushed aside from the popular kids, there is no cohesion in the school that had witnessed a tragedy a year earlier. And that might be even sadder than the fact that it happened at all.