Jodi Picoult clearly didn’t spend her lockdown(s) baking sourdough or knitting scarves. Evidently, she was writing. Her latest novel, Wish You Were Here (published in November this year in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers), is one of the first Covid storylines out of the gate.
Picoult is a no-nonsense novelist who certainly doesn’t tiptoe around thorny issues, touchy subjects or societal sensitivities. In her 27th published novel, she stays true to form with a powerfully evocative story of resilience and the triumph of the human spirit in an extremely testing time for our world.
Understandably, readers the world over are Covid-fatigued and don’t want to touch any pandemic-related material with a bargepole, but I’d nevertheless like to implore you to give Wish You Were Here a chance. The harsh realities, regulations and ramifications of Covid have dominated our news cycles ad infinitum, but this book is about so much more than just the havoc that ensued when the virus struck New York in March 2020.
Diana O’Toole is a young New Yorker working as an associate specialist at Sotheby’s. She lives with her surgical-resident boyfriend Finn, and has her life carefully mapped out. She is a careerwoman who loves her job, wants to be married at age thirty, move to the suburbs and have two children.
The couple had planned a holiday to a remote tropical island in the Galápagos, but on the eve of their departure Finn breaks the news that the sudden increase in coronavirus cases means he is needed at the hospital. He encourages her to go on their non-refundable trip without him, and she hesitantly agrees.
Little does Diana know that the virus, of course, is already everywhere and she finds herself quarantined when the island shuts down on the day of her arrival. She is stranded without lodgings and Wi-Fi, which means she’s unable to contact Finn or anyone else, and her lost luggage is just the icing on this particular, horrific cake. Ultimately, she’s forced to step out of her comfort zone and to make the best of her unplanned circumstances. She ends up staying on the island for two months, filling her days with new experiences, snorkelling, visiting volcanos and connecting with a local family – forming a special bond with their young, troubled teenager.
Of course, it’s in the Galápagos Islands where Darwin formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection, which leads Diana to become introspective about her own evolvement during her time on the island and how it may affect her life and prospects of her carefully planned future in New York.
Quintessentially Picoult, all is not what it seems, and there are several severe twists in the tale. The book’s research is also impeccable, based on actual experiences of recovered Covid-19 patients who had spent time on ventilators, as well as interviews with medical professionals who faced and continue to face the challenges of Covid. Through the emails Diana occasionally receives from Finn, Picoult paints vivid and horrific scenes that played out in hospitals at the time.
But again, this novel isn’t solely about Covid. It’s also about the wonderful and mysterious world of art restoration and auctioning, particularly the works of French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It further touches on such subjects as the topography and biomes of the Galápagos, environmental issues, tortoises, volcanos, childhood trauma, relationships and much besides. Picoult has a knack for weaving together subject matter so diverse that it has no business appearing on the same page, and she does it seamlessly and unobtrusively, educating whilst entertaining.
The pandemic has undeniably left our world forever changed, and we therefore can’t blame novelists for writing about it. It’s the nature of the beast. Wish You Were Here may have started out as an exercise in exorcising anxiety (Picoult suffers from asthma, and she admits Covid initially paralysed her with fear), but instead of just using a pandemic-ridden world as a milieu, Picoult really delved into the subject and its impact on us. If anyone was going to make a success of a Covid novel, my wager would probably have been on her, and so it proved. Read it, you will be glad you did.
