Asperger’s syndrome: An autism spectrum disorder that is characterised by significant difficulties in social interaction, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests. It differs from other autism spectrum disorders by its relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive development. Although not required for diagnosis, physical clumsiness and atypical use of language are frequently reported.
(Source: Wikipedia)
Meet Jacob Hunt, ostensibly an average 18-year-old American boy, who goes to school, stays with his family and follows his routine. Correction: religiously follows his routine.
The problem: He’s charged with murder. The bigger problem: He has Asperger’s syndrome and he is charged with murder.
This is the backdrop of Jodi Picoult’s latest emotional whirlwind, House Rules, about a family which struggles to keep the cloth together despite the edges being frayed with the wear and tear of the everyday mundane and when it threatens to rip apart in the face of the big crisis when the eldest son is arrested for murder. The crux of the book is not the murder and all the hullabaloo around it, but the kid’s disorder, the implications of a behavioural trait which is presumed lacking in Jacob and on the back of which the entire story rides.
Jacob Hunt’s life is governed by a set of rules, literally. The slightest departure from the scheme results in a “meltdown”, when he starts slapping his hand against his thigh, goes seemingly deaf to all sounds around him and folds into himself, disappearing into his own world, oblivious to anything else. His family is, of course, used to these “tantrums”, as they may appear to a “normal” person. His mother has schooled him into calming down listening to Bob Marley, and starts humming “I shot the sheriff, but I didn’t shoot no deputy...”
Jacob fills his inability to socially interact with others with dialogues from films he’s seen and remembers when he can’t think of an original, “normal” reply. He doesn’t understand metaphors, he understands words and phrases for their literal meaning. He is petrified of swimming because his instructor told him it would be a piece of cake and he actually thought he’d have to hold a piece of cake underwater and he would surely drown.
A forensic science enthusiast, Jacob sneaks out of the house he shares with his mother Emma and younger brother Theo to crash crime scenes being investigated by the police. He even manages to point the cops in the right direction when they seem to be going off-course.
So when Jacob’s tutor is found dead, his “guilty” behaviour, not meeting a person’s eyes when talking to them and not giving straight or coherent replies, seems to be all that the cops need to book him for murder. Moreover, we do know he did move the body. In fact, he actually places Jess Ogilvy’s body and sets up the crime scene so that the cops find it and suspect Jess’ boyfriend Mark Maguire to be behind it. Jacob is hiding something, and this elusive secret makes everyone assume that he’s guilty. Even his mother is loath to confront the possibility that he could be a murderer but her actions are based on the presumption that her son is guilty. In fact, her world revolves only around her elder son, with Theo, her younger son, just hovering on the periphery.
Theo, meanwhile, has problems of his own. With his mother preoccupied with his brother, Theo breaks into empty houses, makes himself comfortable and once he’s had his fill, leaves, but not before picking up a knick-knack or two, an iPod or a Wii game. As it would happen, one of the houses Theo breaks into is Jess’ and, as we subsequently discover, knows more than he’s letting on.
Picoult looks at the complexities of relationships in the face of extreme situations. It’s poignant, it’s funny and it makes you think “what if”.
But it can also be monotonous, depressing and too weepy.
The enduring themes of the supreme ever-sacrificing mother and the somewhat less selfless, but still very protective and loving, siblings, as seen in Picoult’s famous book My Sister’s Keeper, are essayed here too, with a little tweak here and there to make them seem different.
The basic thread of the story seems nothing new, it’s just in a different package. It doesn’t put the reader in an ethical dilemma, you just wonder what the suspense is, which, as it turns out, is not exactly what you were hoping for. The bigger surprise turns out to be Jacob’s reasons for doing what he did, and which runs contrary to everything that Picoult leads her readers to believe, almost deceptively, is to expected from someone suffering from Asperger’s syndrome.