Nineteen Minutes is a novel about a school shooting published by Jodi Picoult in early 2007. That publication date is essential information for any analysis of the book. Publication predates the Sandy Hook massacre of first-grade students as well as the debacle at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in which almost four hundred armed law enforcement officers failed to stop one lone gunman from slaughtering nineteen young students.
Picoult’s book does not attempt to address the phenomenon of school shootings through metaphor nor does she attempt to make school shootings a metaphor for a more comprehensive sociological problem. The book is also not intended as an act of political activism existing as a call-to-arms manifesto calling for the passage of legislative policies capable of reducing the number of such incidents. The experience of reading the novel today is fundamentally different from what it was for those who read the novel in the first few years of release. It has essentially become a time capsule offering a glimpse into another era associated with the epidemic of school shootings that has never spread beyond the borders of America.
Picoult’s novel presents a narrative about a school shooting completely within the concept of storytelling. It is a story of a mass shooting that could fairly easily transfer its setting to a workplace environment or even just a random active shooter event at a concert, parade, or political rally. It is not viscerally dependent upon a school being the site of the violence. Nineteen Minutes appeared early enough in the school shooting phenomenon that there had not yet been enough similar content to warrant what has since become the literary sub-genre of “school shooting fiction.” It was written early enough that simply creating a fictionalized story of a school shooting was enough. It was written at a time when the story it tells would have warranted never-ending coverage on the 24-hour news networks for two or three days. Today, its story would warrant live coverage on the day it happened with the possibility of completely disappearing from the news two days later. In other words, Picoult’s school shooting is a novel written at a time when the story of a school shooting required only the mechanics of plot and character to make it stand out. It is a novel written when the central issue of school shootings circled the psychology of the shooter himself with little emphasis on the social issues allowing that psychology to manifest as a shooting rampage.
As such, the central concern of the plot is the character of the shooter, a high school boy named Peter. The narrative enters the school to introduce the various other students around whom Peter’s life orbits. These characters are guaranteed to become either victims or survivors. The two most significant characters besides the shooter are a girl named Josie and a boy named Matt. These two together form a sort of symbiotic parasitical entity that will ultimately become the blame for triggering Peter’s psychotic episode. Peter is initially just friends with Josie but develops romantic feelings for her while she, in turn, becomes sexually active with the most popular boy in school, Matt. Josie’s rejection is connected to Matt’s publicly humiliating Peter which becomes the moment that initiates Peter’s thirst for vengeance. The story is, therefore, a relatively straightforward accounting of the kind of school shooting incidents and reactions that were fairly typical at the time. The only attempt at introducing ambiguity in the sense of societal responsibility is the revelation that Peter was not the only person to pull the trigger and fire a bullet that day. Other than that, there is just a single short scene tepidly suggesting a link between Peter’s father owning guns and Peter being a juvenile capable of accessing such dangerous firepower.
Picoult’s novel tells a story of a school shooting offering little in the way of broader socio-political commentary but with engaging characters and a structure that allows for not just the shooting itself to be told but the trial afterward. It is the trial that is more interesting than the shooting as Peter’s lawyer presents a defense argument akin to self-defense somewhat similar to the argument presented by victims of domestic abuse who eventually kill their abusers. The question that is raised is whether becoming a persistent victim of bullying justifies a school shooting that targets those bullies. The flaw in this logic is, of course, presented by the prosecution.
While it may not be fair to judge a novel about a school shooting published in 2007 based on everything that has happened—and not happened—since then, it is impossible to deny that the success of Picoult’s take on the issue lies entirely within the mechanics of storytelling. The novel delivers precisely what it promises. It is a well-written tale that seeks a fair psychological answer to why someone becomes a school shooter without necessarily justifying that answer. Today, it must be read in the wake of the comprehensive loosening of gun control laws, widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories about school shootings being faked, and the massive law enforcement failure in Uvalde and subsequent attempts to cover up that failure by Texas politicians. Picoult’s story—while still undeniably powerful on its turns—is coming to seem more and more quaint every single time a school shooting happens and nothing is done to address the one single aspect connecting them all.
