Vanishing Acts

Vanishing Acts is Jodi Picoult’s 2005 novel, set primarily in Arizona and built around one of her characteristically difficult premises. The protagonist Delia Hopkins is a search and rescue tracker living in a small New Hampshire town with her four year old daughter Sophie and her aging father Andrew, who has raised her alone since the death of her mother when Delia was four. Delia’s settled life is upended when Andrew is arrested by federal agents who have come to take him back to Arizona to face kidnapping charges. The kidnapping in question, the agents inform her, was Delia herself. Twenty eight years earlier, Andrew had taken Delia from her mother’s custody in the middle of a custody dispute and had spent the intervening decades hiding both of them from the woman Delia had been told was dead.

The novel works through the legal, emotional, and moral consequences of this revelation. Delia has to figure out what to make of the father who has been her entire world, who has also been a kidnapper and who has lied to her about her mother’s existence for her entire life. Andrew has to face the legal consequences of decisions he made twenty eight years earlier under circumstances that the prosecution has no interest in understanding. Delia’s mother Elise, the woman Delia had been told was dead, has to deal with the sudden reappearance of a daughter she had spent decades grieving. And the wider question of why Andrew actually took Delia, what his reasons had been at the time and whether those reasons could in any sense justify what he did, slowly unfolds across the page count.

Jodi Picoult uses her standard rotating perspectives technique, with chapters from Delia, Andrew, Elise, and various supporting characters including Delia’s lifelong best friend Eric who is now her lawyer. The legal procedural elements are accurate and well researched. The handling of the kidnapping case, the custody questions, and the wider trauma that Andrew’s choices have caused for everyone in his orbit is rendered with the kind of seriousness the material requires.

The Hopi cultural material in the novel, which becomes increasingly important across the second half, was developed through Picoult’s research with members of the Hopi community in Arizona, and the questions about indigenous spiritual practice and the relationship between Hopi and non Hopi understanding of identity and family run as a counterpoint to the legal procedural plot.

For longtime Picoult fans, Vanishing Acts is one of her stronger novels.