White Bags and Straight Hair

I look down on people who read Jodi Picoult. They are, to me, the sort of individuals who get up one day and think to themselves, 'Oh my, I have not read a book this entire year. How can that be?' They are rather an unexcitable lot who deign to use the exclamation mark in their lives. I imagine them to be lumpy, possess straight hair and have a certain love life with their jobs. It goes without saying, they belong strictly to the middle-class. They hang out with people exclusively of their own age group as they fear anyone who is younger than them by five years or older than them by six years. They hardly go to bookstores to buy books. They patronize the store simply for fashion magazines or women magazines. They get their Jodi Picoult from the neighbourhood Popular bookstore. They watch Hollywood blockbusters like Shrek. And they always carry white bags. A curious fact, this.

Now I admit it is not all my imagination. Some of them I see from day to day.

I have never touched Jodi Picoult. She might be a decent writer I suppose. Some publisher at least thought so. She belongs to a camp of blowsy authors who concern themselves with tragedies of the American middle-class family. I detest the genre abominably. It is always the same overwrought mother and cheating husband who is faintly repulsively attractive to other women and the rebellious or overtly concerned teen spawn. And the environmental hazard, the bloody four-wheeler. It espouses the stream of the paranoid American consciousness and the most fashionable school of thought would of course devour it and praise the factory-book to the heavens. I say 'factory-book' because it is mass-produced. Not the book (which, of course, is always available immediately in paperback) but the story.

My dog could probably write her own bestseller if she wanted to, about her tragic relationship with her brother and mother for example.