The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  14. After Daniel takes his revenge, does he believe he is more of a superhero? Does he really think he has avenged Trixie? What is the story saying about retribution?

  15. Why is snow symbolic in the story? What other symbols are there?

  16. Trixie is haunted by Jason’s ghost. Is this a figment of her imagination or a manifestation of guilt?

  Reading Group Tips

  1. Research Dante; one great website is http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/dante/.

  2. List some interesting tidbits about the first comic book super-heroes (refer to http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8580/Hist1/ for some great information).

  3. For more information on Jodi Picoult and to sign up for her newsletter, visit http://www.jodipicoult.com/. Be sure to listen to her discuss The Tenth Circle in her AuthorBytes presentation, and to read the conversation with her about the research behind the novel.

  Questions for the Author

  1. Do you feel that The Tenth Circle was a departure from your previous work?

  JP: Not really. Although, at first glance, it looks a little different . . . the truth is that this novel, like so many of my others, explores the connections between a parent and a child, and revisits the theme of whether we really ever know anyone as well as we think we do. I like to think of it as Picoult-Plus: in addition to giving book clubs and buddies plenty to debate, you get another venue through which to unravel those issues—the artwork.

  2. Can you tell us a little about the research you did writing this novel?

  JP: I started with Dante’s Inferno. I’d read it in college, and didn’t really like it, so I decided to give it another chance. Well, to be honest, I still don’t like it . . . but I’m mature enough now to appreciate some of his timeless themes—such as how the punishment fits the crime, and how you should be careful what you wish for . . . lest it come true. The worst thing you can do, according to Dante, is betray someone close to you—which fit very well with the story I was trying to tell in The Tenth Circle.

  I went from reading Dante to reading comic books—because I knew my main character was going to be a comic book penciller. Having never been a thirteen-year-old boy, this genre was new to me . . . and not only did I immerse myself in actual comics, I also studied their history. The origin of modern comics traces back to two young Jewish men who couldn’t get newspaper jobs during the Depression. Shuster and Siegel instead imagined a world where the loser got the pretty girl and saved the world to boot—and their hero, Superman, greatly appealed to a country that desperately needed a hero. Superheroes evolved—all good guys in tights—until the 1960s, when Marvel introduced Spiderman. He wasn’t a willing hero; he was moody and angry and resentful and a lot like the teens who were reading him. Now heroes have grown even more complex—Alan Moore’s and Neil Gaiman’s works spotlight heroes who don’t always win, who enjoy inflicting pain. I spent a great deal of time with my twelve-year-old son, Jake, our resident comic book expert, who immersed me in his favorite story lines. The more I learned, the more I realized that the epic poem and the comic book genre have a lot more in common than you’d think, since they both view a man’s life as the struggle between good and evil; they both address the vast gap between who we pretend we are and who we truly are.

  I knew that Daniel’s struggle, in the book, was going to be precipitated by his daughter’s date rape . . . which led me to sit down a group of teenage girls and interview them, quite candidly, about sex and dating today. Now, I’ve done this before—for The Pact, for Salem Falls—but more than once during this conversation I found myself absolutely stunned. Instead of relationships, kids have random hookups, or friends with benefits—sexual experiences that the next day they pretend never happened. Oral sex isn’t considered sex. At parties, you’ll see games like Stoneface and Rainbow—which involve a boy with multiple sex partners, or a girl servicing several guys. The biggest reason to have sex in the first place is to get it over with; the pressure doesn’t come from boys, but from within the girl herself—you don’t want your girlfriends to find out you’re not doing the same things they are. And perhaps most upsetting—the girls told me that they feel empowered, because they’re the ones deciding whether or not to do these things. They pretend it doesn’t hurt when they’re not valued by the boys they “hook up” with, but then told me stories about cutting themselves with razor blades when the one-night stand didn’t materialize into something more lasting. It was clear to me that we’re turning out a generation of kids who don’t know how to have a relationship with someone. We’re sending young men to college who expect to get what they want when they want it (which supports the growing number of date rapes on campuses). We’re seeing high school girls who don’t even realize that what they’re “choosing” to do objectifies them, and strips them of any self-esteem. When I’ve gone to high schools to speak to students and I mention this research, the looks I get from the student audience are priceless—their jaws drop, because (a) I know about it and (b) I’m brave enough to tell them I know. Believe me, parents are not sitting around dinner tables talking about this—and this made me think of The Pact. Teen suicide, like teen sexuality, is an issue parents would rather not discuss with their kids, fearing that if they bring it up they might plant ideas in their child’s mind. But the sad truth is that it’s happening whether or not we want to talk to our kids about it . . . and based on my research for this book, it’s something we need to start talking about in earnest. Now.

  The last bit of research I did—and the most fun—involved going to the Alaskan bush in the middle of winter, so that I could see through Daniel’s eyes. The airline reservation clerk laughed when I told her where I wanted to go in January—ultimately, I had to take a cargo plane from Anchorage to Bethel, with a load of sled dogs. It was 40 degrees Fahrenheit when I arrived, and I wore everything in my luggage at once and still had to borrow clothes. First, I helped out at the K300, a sled dog race, just like Trixie (you know you’ve arrived in Alaska when a lady musher grabs your arm and asks you to hold up a feed bag so that she can drop trou and pee). Then I headed to a Yup’ik Eskimo village. The villages are north of Bethel, and the only way to get there in January is to take a snowmobile up the frozen river (which, in the winter, actually gets its own highway number). Akiak is a village of three hundred, with no running water. My host was a Yup’ik Eskimo named Moses Owen. As I walked into his house, I tripped over a moose hoof in the Arctic entryway. I brought him oranges; he gave me dried fish. There are, of course, no toilets—just “honeybuckets”—a misnomer if ever there was one. Moses’s wife had her grandchild on her knee, and he kept pointing at me and laughing. She explained that he’d never seen anyone with my color hair before. In fact, Moses said, when the first whites came to the Alaskan bush, they were so pale that the Eskimos thought they were ghosts.

  Moses explained to me that in his world, there’s a fluidity between the animal world and the human one. At any moment, a person might turn into an animal, or vice versa. They also believe that words have remarkable power and that thought is equally as important as action—just because a word isn’t said out loud doesn’t mean its intention isn’t received. For example, if you go hunting and you’re thinking of elk, you’ll never catch one . . . because it can hear you. You must think of anything but the elk. Likewise, it would be downright rude to change someone’s mind by putting your own words into it. So you might say to a friend, “Tomorrow’s a good day to hunt.” It will be up to your buddy to understand that you’re actually inviting him along. To a Yup’ik Eskimo, then, silence is an act. Words are a weapon. And you don’t have to speak a wish for it to come true. Imagine, then, a case of date rape. Legally it always comes down to whether or not the girl said no. But to someone who’d grown up among the Yup’ik Eskimos—like Daniel Stone—it wouldn’t have mattered if Trixie said it . . . or merely thought it.

  3. Readers tend to respond emotionally to your novels. Have any reactions to The Tenth Circle surprised you? If so, how?