In ‘Vanishing Acts,’ a story that isn’t all it appears

Deep into her often admirable new novel, “Vanishing Acts,” Jodi Picoult does something odd. She has told the story from the first-person viewpoints of several characters -- Delia Hopkins, who discovers that her beloved, supposedly widowed father kidnapped her from Arizona to New Hampshire when she was 4 in an effort to flee from her alcoholic mother; her father, Andrew, who is extradited back to Arizona to await trial on the long-ago kidnapping charge and held in a jail ruled by vicious racial gangs; her lifelong friend Fitz, a newspaper reporter sent to cover the trial; her fiance, Eric, who becomes Andrew’s defense attorney; and her long-lost mother, Elise, a now-sober former bar girl who practices Mexican traditional healing as a curandera. Then suddenly we learn that Fitz has been writing the whole novel. Only his point of view is 100% reliable.

The others’ stories are merely what Fitz has overheard or intuited. Shouldn’t we have to reconsider them all?

Well, no. This isn’t a serious work of postmodernism. This is a novel on the literary side of popular about a young woman who copes with her inner sense of loss by making a living finding people with the help of a search-and-rescue bloodhound, who struggles to keep her balance when all the props of her life are knocked away and who finds that everyone she loves has been lying to her.

We’re meant to take all the narratives at face value. Otherwise we wouldn’t just wonder how Andrew, in a few weeks, could become so deeply knowledgeable about jail culture and methamphetamine trafficking, or how Delia, on the basis of a short acquaintance with a Native American woman in Phoenix, could learn so much about Hopi mysticism and even secretly witness a ritual suicide. We’d wonder how Fitz could possibly know or guess such things.

Instead, we should convict Picoult (“Plain Truth,” “My Sister’s Keeper”) of the writerly misdemeanor of emptying her notebooks and move on to the strengths of “Vanishing Acts”: the graceful prose, the flawed but endearing characters, the crackling courtroom scenes. Picoult makes us ponder the ambiguous relationships between love and lying, legality and morality; the strange ways repressed memories leak into the present.

Is some residue of Elise’s drunken neglect behind both Delia’s tolerance of Eric’s alcoholism and her reluctance to marry him, though their daughter, Sophie, is already 4 -- Delia’s age when Andrew snatched her? Was Delia molested as a toddler by the man Elise later married? Memories of such abuse ooze to the surface as the trial goes on -- but are they true or just another trick the mind plays on itself? For Delia, certainty is a mirage until the very end, and even then its edges waver.

Michael Harris is a regular contributor to Book Review.