The Tenth Circle is packed
with different themes and references.  Trixie Stone is fourteen years old, and
her hockey-star boyfriend Jason broke up with her recently.  She has been
devastated, and she desperately wants to get him back.  So she and her best friend
Zephyr hold a party; their plan is for Trixie to make Jason jealous so he will
want her back.  But their plans go awry and in the middle of the night, Trixie
goes home and tells her father Daniel that Jason raped her.  They go to the
hospital where she is assigned a sexual assault advocate to accompany her through
the examination.  The police come to interview Trixie, and their investigation
starts.  Trixie is ostracized at school, since everyone thinks that she has
made up her story.  She was already engaging in some self-cutting before this
all started, and now her self-destructiveness gets worse.

Part of the problem is that
Trixie’s parents were pre-occupied with other worries over the preceding
months.  Her mother Laura, a university professor, was having an affair with
one of her graduate students, and on the night of the rape, she was not even at
home and she was not answering her cell phone.  Her father Daniel knew about
the affair, but had not confronted Laura about it.  He was also focusing on his
own work as a comic book artist: after many years of struggle, he was at last
starting to have some success.  So both of them were blind to the difficulties
that Trixie was going through before her rape, and they didn’t even know that
Jason had broken up with her.

By addressing issues of teen
sexuality and date rape, Picoult faces hot-button topics that get plenty of
press attention.  Trixie and Zephyr decide to play "Rainbow"
at their party, and they also plan to play "Stoneface,"
"Daisy
Chain," and they end up playing strip poker.  They get drugs and
alcohol.  So it is no surprise that this all leads to trouble.  But the
question is whether Jason should be punished for what ends up happening, and
Picoult avoids that question by piling on more drama in the plot.

In flashbacks, we learn about
Daniel’s childhood growing up as the only white boy on an Alaskan Eskimo
village of Yup’ik people.  He too suffered teasing and ostracism for his
difference, making him socially isolated, and he left when he was a teenager,
moving to Maine and making a living for himself as a street artist.  Yet he
also came to appreciate the Yup’ik legends and ways of dealing with
difficulty.  As Picoult repeatedly returns to this part of Daniel’s life and
the mystery he has made of it, it becomes a narrative inevitability that they
characters will end up in Alaska.  Indeed, doing away with any semblance of
plausibility in plot, the whole family goes to the city of Daniel’s youth,
learning not only more about his past, but about the wisdom of the native
culture.  Despite its problems of alcoholism and poverty, this culture serves
as a counterbalance in the novel to the rushed disconnection of life in modern
small-town Maine.

As if all this were not enough,
Picoult ties all these themes together with Dante’s Inferno from his
poem The Divine
Comedy.  Laura’s main teaching is about Dante; Daniel’s comic book is The
Tenth Circle, and the whole novel explores the different sins people commit
and the consequences that follow.  At the start of each chapter, we get an
excerpt from Daniel’s work (actually drawn by comic book artist Dustin
Weaver), featuring his hero Wildclaw, a middle-aged man who can turn into
various wild animals.  His teenage daughter is taken by Satan into Hell, and
Wildclaw has to follow him through all the different levels to rescue her.  In
Dante’s Inferno, there were just nine levels of Hell, so the idea of the
Tenth Circle is that it includes a sin Dante didn’t include — self-deception. 
It is for people who refuse to face who they really are.  It’s never clear why
this is the most terrible sin of all, worse than murder and rape. 

Picoult is a prolific author,
writing about a book a year.  The Tenth Circle is crowded with ideas
that are never fully worked out, and that seem to be there more for effect than
to make a strong point.  The same is true of her earlier novel My Sister’s
Keeper (reviewed
in Metapsychology 8:46), which is now being turned into a Hollywood movie.  The plot moves fast, verging on melodrama and sensationalism.  Since her
novels get into the bestsellers lists, her style clearly works well for many
readers.  Yet judging from the readers’ comments at Amazon.com, many will find
her work unsatisfying. 

The unabridged audiobook is
performed by Carol Monda.  It is a strong reading, that keeps the different
characters separate yet being muted enough to play down the melodramatic
elements.  This audio version lacks the comic book part that precede each
chapter, and this may also help to tone down the silliness of the plot, thus
making it more appealing. 

Links:

• Jodie Picoult web
  page
• Alaska Native
  Heritage Center
• Review
  of Rainbow Party

© 2007 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.