The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle is Jodi Picoult’s 2006 novel, set primarily in a small Maine town and built around one of her characteristically difficult premises. The novel centers on the Stone family. Daniel Stone is a graphic novelist working on a personal project based on Dante’s Inferno. His wife Laura is a Dante scholar who teaches at the local college and is in the middle of an affair with one of her graduate students. Their fourteen year old daughter Trixie has been dating a popular high school senior named Jason. When Trixie reports that Jason raped her at a party, the family is plunged into the kind of crisis that the small town setting makes harder to navigate rather than easier.

The novel works through the legal, emotional, and moral consequences of the accusation and the wider investigation. Daniel, whose own past involves significant violence that he has spent his adult life trying to outrun, has to figure out what to do with the rage that the situation produces in him. Laura has to deal with both her daughter’s trauma and the recognition that her own absence from the family during the affair has contributed to the conditions in which the incident occurred. Trixie has to navigate the slow developing realization of what she actually wants from the legal process and what she can actually live with regardless of which way the case goes.

Jodi Picoult uses her standard rotating perspectives technique, with chapters from Daniel, Laura, Trixie, and various supporting characters including the detective working the case and the lawyer representing Jason. The Dante’s Inferno frame runs through the novel in interesting ways, with Daniel’s graphic novel pages reproduced between chapters of the prose narrative giving the book a visual element that the standard Picoult novel does not typically have. The tenth circle of the title points to a circle of hell that Daniel is adding to Dante’s original nine, with implications for the moral questions the novel raises about violence, forgiveness, and what kinds of acts are unforgivable.

The novel is one of Picoult’s more morally serious works, and the handling of sexual assault, of family trauma, and of the complicated question of whether violence committed in defense of a loved one is justified or condemnable, is rendered with the seriousness the material requires. For longtime Picoult fans, The Tenth Circle is one of her stronger novels. For new readers, the book deals with difficult subjects with the kind of care that has made Picoult one of the most loved writers in her corner of contemporary fiction.