Book 319: Nineteen Minutes
School shootings seem to be making the news on a depressingly regular basis these days, but in those reports, we don’t hear much about the shooters. We hear them called monsters, and we’re told that if only they haven’t worn black/played violent video games/listened to rock music, they would have turned out ok.
But would they? Those people are human beings too, and I think that’s something that gets forgotten a lot. In Nineteen Minutes, Picoult tries to imagine a Columbine-like shooting in which the shooter lives to tell his side of the story, with a few twists in the narrative.
There are parts of this book that are definitely melodramatic and cliched, for sure, but the book is also very humanizing. The story centers around the shooter, but the lives of other people are also involved, including law enforcement, victims, lawyers, and so forth. A high school girl struggles in an abusive relationship while she plays the game to fit in with the popular crowd. A bullied loner walks into a school one day with a backpack full of guns. Another bullied loner doesn’t. Jocks tease, and teachers reach out (but not enough), and parents fail.
Forcing people to read books is generally not very productive, but I can’t help but think that this book could be beneficial to a lot of people, bullied and bully alike. To know, as is said at one point in the book, that you are not alone, that is a powerful thing. And I think that many people who bully recognize on some level that what they are doing is hateful, but they feel compelled to do it anyway, and unable to stop. Maybe a graphic illustration would get the message across.
Maybe I identify with this book because I was very much a loner in school, and I spent most of my time on the fringes of things. I was the kind of loner that didn’t really get noticed to be picked on, fortunately, but I can see how a life of constant bullying and torment would drive one into desperation. Battered women’s syndrome gets brought up in the story, as an explanation for that it feels like when you are constantly under threat, and I think it’s a very good illustration of how harmful bullying can be.
And how harmful it is to not step forward and stop it. When someone is being bullied and you do nothing about it, you are complicit. You might not be performing the act yourself, but you might as well be. Because, let me tell you something: if you haven’t been there, if you haven’t been marginalized and bullied and tormented, you really don’t know what it’s like. I remember every individual act of kindness anyone ever did for me, and I also remember every single time that people did nothing. I remember every face and word and deed. I remember every act of cruelty, every casually belittling word and “accidental” humiliation.
I will remember it for the rest of my life.
Demographics:
Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult. Published 2007, 440 pages. Fiction.
Tags: book project