House Rules

House Rules is Jodi Picoult’s 2010 novel and one of her most ambitious in terms of psychological territory. The central character is Jacob Hunt, an eighteen year old with Asperger’s syndrome and an obsessive interest in forensic crime scenes. Jacob spends his days watching CrimeBusters on cable and meticulously analyzing the evidence on each episode, often picking up clues the fictional detectives miss. His mother Emma has built her life around his needs, his younger brother Theo has spent years being the less demanding child whose own life keeps getting set aside, and his social skills tutor Jess Ogilvy is one of the few people outside the family who reaches him.

When Jess is found dead and the evidence at the crime scene points unmistakably toward Jacob, the family is plunged into a legal nightmare made worse by the fact that Jacob’s neurological profile makes him both unable to defend himself in the ways the criminal justice system expects and unable to stop himself from acting on the truth as he understands it. Picoult uses her standard rotating perspectives technique, with chapters narrated by Jacob, Emma, Theo, the prosecuting detective, and the lawyer who reluctantly takes the case. Each voice is distinct and each adds to the slowly clarifying picture of what actually happened.

What makes the novel risky and important is Picoult’s commitment to writing Jacob from the inside. The autistic perspective she gives him is more careful and more researched than most depictions in mainstream fiction of its era, and the book deals seriously with how the criminal justice system fails people whose brains do not work in the ways the system assumes. Some readers from the autism community have found the novel sympathetic and accurate. Others have raised legitimate concerns about specific portrayals. Both responses are worth taking seriously.

For readers who like Picoult at her most intellectually ambitious, House Rules is one of her stronger novels. The central question of who actually committed the crime and why becomes secondary to the larger questions about justice, family, and the limits of legal procedure when the accused does not fit the assumptions the law was built around.