Book Review: Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
March For Our Lives Rally, Texas, 2018
Evie Robinson reviews Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes, which explores gun violence and whether it is possible to humanise mass shooters.
Gun control is one of the most prolific issues in American politics in the present day. It is divisive, sensitive, and controversial. Some Americans long for a ban on all guns after years of gun violence, and others insist it is their human right to possess a weapon; a right arguably enshrined in the US Constitution by the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. Mass shootings are an all-too-regular occurrence in American society; between 2011 and 2014, it was estimated that at least one mass shooting occurred every 64 days. Many writers, as well as TV and film makers, have explored the fierce debate over gun control for the past two decades, but it was Jodi Picoult who best captured the tragedy and complexity of this issue for me. When I recently finished Nineteen Minutes in just four days during quarantine, I decided Picoult’s beautiful yet brutal writing on what I believe to be one of America’s most divisive issues deserved some exploration.
Nineteen Minutes tells the story of a mass shooting at Sterling High School, which takes place in 2007 in New Hampshire, America. It follows Peter Houghton’s massacre through the grounds of his school after enduring years of brutal bullying by his peers. Picoult takes us through the events leading up to the shooting: seventeen years before, five years before, one year before, the morning of. She shows us Peter’s evolution, from a child who delights over receiving a Superman lunchbox from his mother on the first day of kindergarten, only to have it thrown out of the school-bus window by the bullies sitting on the back seats, to a teenager at breaking point drawing a red circle around photos of his planned victims in his high-school yearbook.
We hear from each person affected by the shooting. Peter’s parents Lacy and Lewis, trying not to blame themselves for their son’s actions. Superior court judge Alex Cormier, torn over whether to recuse herself from the Houghton case because her daughter was present during the shooting. Patrick Ducharme, the only detective on the Sterling police force, tasked with piecing together evidence in an attempt to understand Peter’s sudden outburst of violence. Jordon McAfee, the public defender committed to giving Peter a fair trial despite the damning evidence of his crimes.
As we hear each of these accounts, a complex narrative of high-school bullying, victimisation, and stereotyping unfolds, and it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss Peter Houghton as simply an inhumane murderer. Picoult certainly employs the mass of high-school stereotypes we often see featured in teen literature and television, but there’s something slightly darker about her depiction of American teenage life. She explores the attitudes of those caught in the middle of teenage conflict, such as Josie Cormier, a girl stuck between the outside and inside of high school popular culture. She dates the most popular athlete at Sterling High School but finds enduring his brutal bullying of her childhood friend Peter morally problematic. Josie is haunted by this inner conflict for months after the shooting; only at the end of the novel do we find out exactly why.
Although the events in the novel are fictional, it seems Picoult places them within a larger trajectory of gun violence in the US, specifically in relation to the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, when teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered twelve of their classmates and a teacher before both committing suicide. They found common ground, feeling like outsiders and experiencing frequent bullying and victimisation, very much matching the profile of the shooter in Picoult’s novel. When Peter Houghton’s bedroom is searched as part of the police investigation into his crime, the authorities find a copy of the documentary film Bowling for Columbine, and one cannot help but draw parallels between the violent computer game that Harris and Klebold made before committing their crimes, and the similar game that Peter constructs on the computer in his bedroom. Selena McAfee, wife of Peter’s defence attorney Jordan, exclaims her disbelief to her husband when watching news coverage of the shooting; “‘it’s like Columbine,’ Selena said. ‘In our backyard’”.
Despite tackling the highly sensitive and politically charged issue of gun violence, Picoult’s own views on the matter never once interfere in her writing. She sets up both advocacy and denunciation of gun control within her writing, leaving her reader feeling increasingly conflicted about how they should react. Should we sympathise with Peter Houghton, a teenage misfit bullied by the same fellow students for his entire life, who lives in the shadow of his “all-American” older brother Joey, and yet finds himself broken in the face of Joey’s death at the hands of a drunk-driver, only one year after he takes the life of his mathematics teacher and eleven of his peers at Sterling High school?
I found myself slipping into Peter’s world, feeling sorry for him because of the awful bullying he suffered, but quickly snapping out of this mindset when Peter open fires on his school cafeteria – not without stopping to eat a bowl of cereal in the midst of his rampage. I sometimes felt uncomfortable reading Peter Houghton’s backstory, and this led me to wonder whether it is right that we hear about the circumstances of the crime. Sentencing and punishment depend very much on the specifics and facts of each individual case, but at what point does the (seeming) justification for their actions make us too sympathetic to mass murderers?
Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes certainly sheds light on the potentially complex backstory to crimes like mass-shootings. How much time should we give to understanding the mindset of a shooter? Whilst it is easy to denounce them as monstrous, we must remember that all criminals are human, and many crimes have a very human story attached to them. Peter Houghton felt broken by enduring years of bullying, and finally snapped in a final attempt to defend himself against his tormentors. Perhaps it is our job to acknowledge the presence of mass-murder as part of society, particularly in the US, in order to understand why it continues to shatter so many, often young, lives.