Jodi Picoult and the Anxious Parent

The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy discussion of child peril lit and what these books say about us as parents.

From the story...

Picoult’s storytelling revels in sequential miseries — no singular unhappiness ever seems sufficient. Various nightmares fuel the plot of “Nineteen Minutes,” a post-Columbine novel and one of her most popular books. Here, a midwife and her academic husband are largely blind to the depths of their son’s isolation — until he shoots close to a dozen of his classmates — just as they were blind to the drug problems and viciousness of an older son, who seemed to function so exceptionally. And yet they appear to be such lovely parents, so well-meaning and engaged (they read The Economist).

In Picoult’s fiction we rarely encounter characterologically bad parents. Instead, we meet mothers and fathers who try and fail, baroquely, to meet the current standards of caring for children — people who affect the deepest concern, who have absorbed the therapeutic language of talk shows and women’s magazines but who are congenitally unable to implement the idiom. Parental inadequacy and elaborate misfortune repeatedly conspire in her books to produce altogether new horrors; by the end of “My Sister’s Keeper,” the family is left to confront a tragedy unprompted by the central maladies, one meant to serve as a cosmic rebuke to the mother’s stilted management. (And one so insistent in its shock value that it may inspire the reader to deposit the book under the wheels of a minivan.)

And talking about parenting, The New Yorker has a brilliant essay by Jill Lepore about Parent Magazine the fuss of parenthood.