Second Glance

Second Glance is Jodi Picoult’s 2003 novel, one of her more ambitious and one of the books that helped widen her literary range beyond the moral dilemma fiction that her readers had come to expect. The novel is set in the small town of Comtosook, Vermont, and built around the strange happenings on a parcel of land that a development company has been trying to acquire for a planned commercial project. The land has been the subject of local rumors for years, and as the development plans move forward, witnesses begin reporting genuinely inexplicable phenomena. Petals of flowers appearing on snow. Voices in empty rooms. The kind of small uncanny incidents that the local residents start to suspect may have something to do with the long Abenaki history of the parcel that no one has been quite willing to discuss.

The novel weaves together several plot threads. Ross Wakeman, a paranormal investigator whose grief over the death of his fiancee has driven him to look for evidence that life continues beyond death, comes to Comtosook to investigate the reports. Meredith Oliver, a geneticist whose work involves prenatal screening for genetic disorders, has her own complicated relationship to the questions about what kinds of human lives are valued and what kinds are not. The historical thread of the novel reaches back to the Vermont eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s, when the state actually pursued a program of forced sterilization aimed largely at people of mixed Abenaki ancestry. Jodi Picoult connects the contemporary supernatural plot to this difficult historical material in ways that give the novel its weight.

Picoult uses her standard rotating perspectives technique, with chapters from Ross, Meredith, and several other characters, and the slowly clarifying picture of what actually happened on the disputed parcel of land emerges across the page count. The supernatural elements are handled with the kind of careful ambiguity that gives them their emotional power. The eugenics history is rendered with the seriousness the material demands, with research that draws on the actual Vermont program and on the wider American history of eugenic sterilization that has only relatively recently begun to receive sustained attention.

For readers who enjoy Picoult at her most ambitious, Second Glance is one of her stronger novels.