I just finished Vanishing Acts, and it enraged me, just like every single book of Picoult's does. I'm so pissed that it's difficult for me to articulate why I find her work so narratively offensive, but I'll try.

Let me first give you my idea of novelistic success: a story motivated by characters' actions, featuring robust, believable people who just happen to live on paper. In the best novels, characters act according to their nature. Their actions are not propelled by the plot; they propel the plot with their actions. Even if what they do is surprising, it's exactly what they have to do because that's who they are. They are psychologically consistent people whose actions provide insight into their heads.

Picoult does not start her stories with robust characters at all. Instead, she starts with abstract concepts. In the case of Vanishing Acts, she's got Memory, Divorce, Alcoholism, Parent/Child Relationships, argle bargle bargle. Upon such a Procrustean bed of Big Important Themes, she throws the generic skeletons of her "characters," or, more precisely, "authorial puppets," who then twitch according to her grindingly blatant plot machinery. And we're supposed to accept this as a story?! Your average car commercial on TV has more genuine, compelling drama.

Now I enjoy a cleverly and neatly turned plot as much as any reader, but that's not what's going on in Picoult's work. What's going on is plot-driven melodrama trying desperately to pass itself off as a Significant Work of Our Times. You can tell it's Significant because there are [obvious, boring, unenlightening] Parallels Between Characters! There are Appropriate Poetic Quotes before each section! There's a Magical Negro Indian character who exists solely to fulfill the whiteys' epiphanies by infodumping Hopi mythology [which then becomes nothing more than a metaphor for…Lord knows what, as I was skimming at this point] and then conveniently offing herself! That makes this book Thematic and Deep, right? Right? Why are you laughing at me???

Picoult's books are all essentially diagrams of checkers games put into words. I was going to say chess, but that's too sophisticated. Maybe Connect Four is a better analogy. She's a cheating cheater who cheats because she tries to pass these diagrams off as stories.

I have really got to stop reading her books. It's like eating something that tastes good while you're chewing it, and then you get a little indigestion several bites in. You ignore it because you want to finish your portion. You continue, and your aches and pains increase. By the end, when your stomach is full, you feel bloated, heartburned, constipated and utterly unable to contemplate anything but the sore state of your digestive system. That's about how I feel right now, literarily speaking. Ooog.