JODI PICOULT Wish You Were Here. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
Jodi Picoult’s latest novel contrasts life in the Galapagos and New York during Covid-19.
Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here is a story about the nature of reality. When Covid-19 first hit in the early months of 2020, few understood just how much of a swathe it would cut through the normality of twenty-first century life. When Diana O’Toole, Picoult’s protagonist and purveyor of fine art at Sotheby’s, leaves the New York apartment she shares with her surgery-resident boyfriend Finn to prepare the sale of a valuable Toulouse-Lautrec, she has no idea that her comfortable world is about to undergo a seismic shift.
Finn, a hospital worker, is already growing nervous about reports of a deadly new virus, even sheepishly admitting to being frightened of a patient with a known smoker’s cough. But there are only 19 cases of Covid to date in New York City, so Diana just perceives the empty subways and tourist-free streets as a cautionary oddity. Certainly she doesn’t see why it should curtail the plans she and Finn have made to visit the Galapagos, where she anticipates Finn will, at some point, drop to one knee amongst the marine iguanas.
Diana has had a life plan ever since she was five: get married by 30, finish having kids by 35, speak fluent French and travel cross-country on Route 66. At 29 we learn she is ‘on track’, provided nothing throws a curve-ball in her way. When Finn tells her that the hospital has cancelled his leave and she will have to go on holiday alone, she still doesn’t recognise this as a premonition of how bad things are going to get.
Oh, and did I mention that all of the above takes place on Friday the thirteenth?
From the very beginning this is a narrative that swings between extremes. Though Diana and Finn are both serious about advancing in their chosen fields, one career exists in the abstract, with objects whose value is entirely subjective; the other deals quite literally in situations of life and death:
I lean my head on his shoulder. ‘I had the shittiest day.’
‘No, I did,’ Finn replies.
‘I lost a painting,’ I tell him.
‘I lost a patient.’
I groan. ‘You win. You always win. No one ever dies of an art emergency.’
Diana is not going to let a mere pandemic get in her way, so she agrees to leave New York for the relative paradise of the Galapagos. After all, it will only be two short weeks and then she can get back to Finn, to her life and to her plans. But she arrives to find the island’s borders closing behind her; the hotel she booked has already shut, banks and ATMs are inoperable and there is no internet connection to ask for help.
In the meantime, the situation back in New York is getting worse. Finn’s intermittent emails do occasionally manage to get through, but all they do is describe a gathering nightmare of fear and uncertainty. No one can predict who the virus will strike next, or if the seemingly healthy individual sitting next to you is a symptomless carrier who will strike you down. Finn is trained in surgery, not infectious diseases, so has no idea if he is being effective even as he tries to do his best amongst a cascading escalation of suffering.
Diana does make progress of sorts. A run-in with a blond-haired man causes some discomfort and embarrassment, especially when she discovers that he is the grandson of a helpful old lady who has loaned her the use of a spare room, but she soon creates a routine and semi-locked-down lifestyle for herself amongst the island’s inhabitants. She is acutely aware of the contrast between her improving situation and the deterioration of Finn’s, and she begins to question everything that, back in New York, had seemed so certain. Is she going to return to the life she lived before? Or will she carve herself some new existence, tanned and carefree, half a world away from everything she previously held dear?
At this point you could be forgiven for thinking you know where this is going – uptight New York professional woman reluctantly goes on island holiday and ends up opting for a Robinson Crusoe-esque existence with a hunky local stranger. But believe me, you would be wrong. For it is at this point that Picoult pulls the narrative rug out from our collective feet, and returns us to the central theme. Without giving too much away, suffice to say that Diana is thrust into a situation where she is forced to confront the nature of reality itself – what is real, what is illusion, and how can anyone ever tell the difference? And maybe that is exactly the point, the lesson life is trying to teach her. As Diana has said herself when describing the surrealist art movement:
The whole point is for the art to make you uneasy, until you realise the world is just a construct. An image that doesn’t make sense to you forces your mind to free associate – and those associations are key to analysing reality on a deeper level.
In the end, what Picoult is doing – both literally and metaphorically – is capturing the insidious nature of how this unexpected and unpredictable disease ripped apart normal people’s lives and almost brought the most technologically advanced civilisations that humanity has ever produced to their knees. In 2019, we thought we understood the world, how it worked, and how to control it. By 2020, we were forced to question everything we previously thought we knew. And perhaps that is exactly what is needed right now as we continue to emerge from under our protective covers and seek to re-enter some kind of normality – a tale that relives the fear, the horror and the apprehension of how we would come through it, but reaffirms that come through it we did and that we can emerge all the stronger for it.
But some of us will have to do it without the benefit of a tropical island.
Jodi Picoult Wish You Were Here Allen & Unwin 2022 PB 336pp $32.99
Sally Nimon once graduated from university with an Honours degree majoring in English literature and has hung around higher education ever since. She is also an avid reader and keen devourer of stories, whatever the genre.
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