By now, Jodi Picoult really knows how to mess up a fictional family. Her best-selling novels have a tested formula: Introduce family and then divide them with a hot-button topic like suicide (2007’s fine “Nineteen Minutes”) or organ donation (2004’s “My Sister’s Keeper,” which was adapted into a motion picture). She certainly has a formidable following. For her 19th novel, Picoult goes out of her way to find a rather bizarre set of family problems.
“Lone Wolf: A Novel” (Emily Bestler Books, New York, 2012, 421 pages) revolves around the unusual circumstances that befall the Warren family of Beresford, New Hampshire. Long fascinated by the behavior of wolves, Luke Warren leaves behind his wife Georgie, son Edward and daughter Cara to actually live with the wolves. When he emerges later on, he is changed, and becomes a celebrity with his own television show, and sets up a center that took care of wolves. Luke winds up losing his wife when it appears he chose the wolves over his family, and his son leaves due to an unspoken disagreement. Only Cara is left, and the two eventually form a strong bond partly through their work with the wolves.
But after Luke and Cara wind up in a horrible car accident, Edward is called back from his new life in Thailand after six long years and finds himself at odds with Cara. Luke has fallen into a vegetative state and Edward believes that his father would prefer to die rather than stay this way—but Cara vehemently disagrees. As with most Picoult novels, “Lone Wolf” results in the siblings facing off in the courtroom with Luke’s life literally on the line. The hearings raise questions about Luke’s character, why Edward really left and ultimately what really led to the fateful car accident.
Picoult alternates chapters mostly from the viewpoint of the two Warren siblings and Luke’s own thoughts during various points in his life prior to the accident, his past actions hanging over the happenings in the rest of “Lone Wolf.” From the very first chapter, Picoult tries very hard to establish Luke as a sympathetic character whose interest in the wolves is born out of a hidden human connection to nature itself.
“There are no fairy tales in the wild, no Cinderella stories. The lowly wolf that seems to rise to the top of the pack was really an alpha all along.” Yet the more Picoult does this, the more it becomes evident that Georgie and the rest of the Warrens seem to be right, that Luke has abandoned them for something wild and unknown. Because of his over-exposition, Luke becomes too much a plot device.
In fact, wolf experts have criticized the book for being wildly inaccurate about the animals.
Picoult is much more effective using Luke’s remembrances as a parallel to the courtroom battle between his children: “In other words, what looks cruel and heartless from one angle might, from another, actually be the only way to protect your family.” Cara and Edward are prototypical Picoult-style family members, both passionately adamant but also deeply wounded, with readers strategically choosing sides while the mother Georgie looks only rather mutely.
As in other Picoult books, secrets are revealed overly conveniently, quirky characters are fielded in rather late (including characters named Helen Bedd and Zirconia Notch, among others) and “Lone Wolf” becomes predictable right toward the end.
What remains intact is Picoult’s ability to keep readers flipping pages because of the tabloid-like issues she immerses the prose in. That humans are no different—or maybe even worse than—wolves and that families are often damaged by what remains unspoken through the years, these are what makes “Lone Wolf” yet another example of the kind of popular if predictable novel that Jodi Picoult’s wolf pack of readers expect her to bring in from the fictional wild once every year.
Available in paperback from National Book Store.
