Review: House Rules (Jodi Picoult)
Oh dear, here comes another Jodi Picoult 'issue novel'. It's managed to fool a few people, like a local Aspie I know who went to a talk by her and managed to come away with the idea that House Rules is based on Picoult having an Aspie kid. I Googled it. No, just another damn issue novel, and I bristle far more when the 'issue' is something I know something about.
As other people have pointed out, Picoult’s attitude to disability is a bit wonky. My heart sank when her acknowledgement mentioned Autism Speaks, and behold, she seems to take that attitude that autism is a tragedy visited upon a family.
Not that she demonises her Aspie boy character Jacob. She mentions the positive aspects of Asperger's, and is aware that it's a continuum from his Aspie-like father who learned to live in the world, to Jacob who struggles and those even weirder autistic people on the other side of him. She makes the point, finally, that his neurotypical brother had done something far more morally wrong than Jacob did, and that where Jacob went wrong was assuming that familial loyalty invariably trumps social responsibility (which is, after all, what he had been taught). This is a real strength in Picoult’s books: she has a habit of weighing-up domestic vs social ethics in a clear-sighted way rather than suggesting that what, say, a mother does emotionally is always right.
But her perception is ‘off’ in a number of important ways.
She thinks that autistic people, even fairly clever AS people, cannot learn. We are apparently as likely to have a meltdown later in our childhood or adult years, as we are to start with. If Aspies were as hair-trigger as her Jacob, we would be unable to enter a public space like a school or a supermarket or a court without huge accommodations being made. I was relatively surprised when Jacob had his pickle-smashing meltdown in the supermarket. This was something that both Jacob and his mother saw coming, and a relatively unimportant event, but it was presented as ‘in spite of his own intelligent awareness and his mother trying to head it off, Jacob must have a meltdown when one of his triggers is hit’. Always. Without exception. Without any awareness that autistics are under strain in a neurotypical world, and on a bad day we might behave in a way that’s socially deprecated, but on a good day less so. What I was expecting is that it would have been a good moment to introduce the idea that with a bit of preparation it’s possible to head off the storm just as any parent does with things that bother their kids, but no, that’s not dramatic enough.
This is at variance with the experience of lots of families. This is a kid who’s had early diagnosis and interventions, but his responses haven’t moved on except intellectually since he was a small child. I know Aspies have a tendency to intellectualise stuff, but this is ridiculous: most of us ‘get the point’ of stuff we’re told eventually even if we’re not all that happy about it. I would expect that early intervention and accommodation would be used to give a child a ‘breathing-space’ while he learns coping strategies that may work in the world. Instead, everything Emma does to help is directly accommodate Jacob’s whims; there appears to be no understanding of working round his idiosyncrasies in a way that may meet ‘outside’ and ‘internal’ requirements.
I had Aspie food fads, but it’s generally possible to work round them in some way not involving changing the entire meal-time around them; my Aspie food fads were mine, and it would not have occurred to me to be at all disturbed by other people eating stuff I couldn’t stand. As someone else in the blogosphere noticed, not only are Jacob’s responses incapable of change, but his Mum makes a new meal for every colour day, with none of the short-cuts real families make to accommodate and work round Aspie eating habits, and no apparent comfort in particular work-arounds that work. It reads as though Emma discovered Jacob had Asperger’s that week, and is making huge efforts, without any of the relative comfort that real families may have after having fifteen years to get used to their child’s Odd Little Ways. There’s also little awareness that Aspie routines are an attempt to impose order on a scary world; instead, they’re presented as irrational superstitions.
The mother Emma’s experience of coping seems to be largely based on scientifically-dodgy interventions involving diet and vitamins, and she’s a covert believer in the scientifically-invalid ‘vaccines cause autism’ theory. As other readers have pointed out, although there is no awareness in the narrative voice that these are questionable, Jacob seems to be no better adapted or less vulnerable for the medication. The other part of her coping method involves ‘always giving in’ to Jacob’s autistic demands. She does this to a fairly unlikely degree, including calling her power company in a power cut because it was ‘medically necessary’ for her son to watch his favourite TV show at 4:30 pm.
For a healthy contrast, read Jacqui Jackson’s autobiographical book Multicoloured Mayhem. She has a large family, of which all the boys have something like autism, Asperger’s or ADHD, while the girls are neurotypical. She had huge difficulties, but reports that Ben, for example, is “not who any of us expected though just as much fun and just as real as any other child. One thing I have learned - never say never!” She doesn’t sugar-coat the difficulties and the embarrassments, but she can tell how her children change over time, and that their vulnerability to meltdowns isn’t an unvarying constant. There’s also an awareness that her kids ‘stimming’ or shouting or running around at home isn’t necessarily Awful Suffering visited upon a family, just a relaxation when out of the world’s view. I think that because her family’s half autistic-spectrum it allows her not to see it as ‘broken’. This is much healthier than Picoult’s assumption that autism is a nightmare visited on a neurotypical family. This book is much less ‘literary’, considered and gripping than House Rules, but it provides a clearer view.
Picoult is guilty of putting a social value on neurotypical experience compared to spectrum experience. Without any irony at all, she reports Emma (the mother)’s and Theo (the neurotypical brother)’s belief that Jacob is blithely expecting everybody else to accommodate his whims while he runs roughshod over everybody else’s needs. Oh, how they suffer from having a selfish ‘cuckoo’ in their ideal nest! It’s perfectly believable that the characters would have this response, but it needs to be hit hard with a clue-by-four. When they want him to accommodate himself to ‘normal’ society they wring their hands at his awfulness and his blindness to what’s needed, while the accommodations he wants are all seen as uniformly unreasonable or unreal.
There’s very little awareness of how autistic sensory experience or the difficulty of living in a neurotypical world affects these ‘demands’, despite the frequent calls for a ‘sensory break’.
She has Emma notice that Jacob once asked her to give Theo ice-cream when his throat hurt. At the time she thought ‘what a nice example of empathy’, but later she decided it was just to shut Theo up and get ice-cream. A neurotypical child doing the same thing might well be considered to be mixing the selfish desire for ice-cream (and for their brother to shut up) with the ‘unselfish’ desire to make the sibling feel better, so this is definitely an example of devaluing or pathologising the autistic response as such rather than seeing it as understandable human behaviour.
Again, Jacob’s desire to have Jess (his social skills teacher) as a girlfriend is presented as ‘oblivious’ selfish autistic behaviour, when lots of teenagers are more aware of their desires than what’s going on in the life of their ‘love object’.
Neurotypicals find it easier to notice other people’s reactions than autistics do, but this does not always make them nicer people. One of the weaknesses of, say, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory on the ‘empathic’ female brain as opposed to the ‘male’ or ‘autistic’ brain is that a capacity for empathy and intuition does not invariably lead to altruism.
The novel comes perilously close to saying that the final outcome is a Greek tragedy caused by Theo’s understandable response to the awfulness of having an autistic brother, rather than that his lousy selfish behaviour all through is a warning sign. It’s possibly true that the author considers that Theo is full of adolescent selfishness while Jacob is full of autistic selfishness, but nobody ever challenges Theo for his selfishness, it’s just seen as a response to Jacob because he feels ‘neglected’ in comparison to Jacob’s ‘unreasonable’ demands.
There is one heart-breaking standout moment in this novel for which I would forgive it a lot, though. When Jacob’s grandfather (whom he likes) dies, Jacob insists on opening the coffin at the funeral and touching his grandfather’s face. His mother and brother think this is Jacob being heartlessly autistic and obsessed with forensics and thus death. It’s revealed later in Jacob’s viewpoint that what was actually happening was that he had an extremely human response to all the eulogies, as in, ‘is this the person I remember or somebody else?’ and wish to understand the mystery of death. But because he cannot understand what his family misunderstands, and cannot effectively communicate, he is unaware that they’re not crediting him for his understandable human feelings, or that their perception is so wrong.
If there were more moments like that, where Jacob is understood as a human being, I would have nothing but praise for this book.
Instead there is altogether too much ‘look how awful autism is!’ Jacob’s social skills teacher is presented as a near-saint, despite her strange desire to haul Jacob up before her boyfriend as some sort of moral lesson, and her wish to set him up with a girl whose sibling has Down’s, presumably to show how wonderful people are when they can ‘see past the disease’. This should be undercut by her preference for a neurotypical complete arsehole of a boyfriend, but no. Obviously people with a disability are objectively ‘less valuable’ than normals, and should rely on occasional ‘saints’ putting up with them.
Damn. Now I want to throw the book at the wall again.
The ending feels slightly rushed, although I like the idea. The way it’s done, with Jacob protecting his brother and sublimely unaware that sometimes justice should override personal considerations (because the ‘rule’ he was given is ‘always look after your brother’) is very neat. It took me a while to see how it looked from Jacob’s point of view, because from a neurotypical viewpoint he’s displaying that his brother did it; but I think he assumed that the ‘rule’ is always look after your brother/family, so he wouldn’t have a clue that his mother’s responsibility to society would have to involve turning Theo in.
I was a bit thrown by the fact there’s no ‘violence’ in the murder, because I assumed the bruising on the throat was a Clue. I suspect it may be a red herring caused by her arsehole boyfriend. Instead, it was all a horrible accident: Theo caused the death accidentally, but due to being a twit teenager didn’t realise she’d die left to herself when he ran away, and then Jacob muddied the waters by ‘setting up’ a forensic scene.
I wanted to know what happened next, and I'd especially like to see a little humility on Emma’s part if she suddenly realised there was a lot more going on in Jacob’s head than she’d thought, but that was where it ended.
It’s not a terrible book. As usual with Picoult, I like the writing style and the way she raises questions of ethics between the domestic and the public sphere absolutely seriously, but I think her view of disability is always irritatingly ‘external’. Rather like the TV show Glee, there's a tendency to 'wheel on' a gimp to act as a moral lesson for the 'real people', which I don't like.