Novel with a message

If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

Martin Luther King

Jodi Picoult is a novelist known for tackling worthy causes. Her books often come with messages attached, and her best-selling 2016 novel Small Great Things attempts to live up to its title by tackling the cause of racial justice. Her message: Most white people in America are racists whether they think they are or not.

Ruth Jefferson, the middle-aged widow of a war hero, is an experienced nurse in the maternity ward of a Connecticut hospital. She is also the only black nurse in her section. When a racist couple, Turk and Brit Bauer, objects to a black nurse caring for their newborn son, the nursing supervisor orders Ruth to stay away.  Then when Ruth is left alone with the newborns and the Bauer baby dies suddenly, she becomes the hospital’s scapegoat and is charged with murder.

The novel has three first-person narrators — Ruth, Turk and Kennedy, the public defender assigned to represent Ruth. Viewing the situation, including a tense trial, from all three perspectives, shows readers that there are at least three ways of looking at it and, surprisingly, leads to some measure of sympathy for each character.

Even so the author concludes there is really only one way of looking at race relations in America, Ruth's way, or more accurately Picoult's way. So the novel, with all the subtlety of a bulldozer, presents its message, then underlines it, highlights it in yellow and slaps it on a billboard. Even Turk buys into it by the story's end.

Small Great Things offers fine reading and will give readers much to think about. If only it didn't try so hard to tell us what to think.