Metaphorical journey through Dante’s Inferno

I admit I’ve not read Dante’s classic, The Inferno, like (I suspect) many other moderately intelligent people I gather the poem is Dante’s journey through Hell, from the First to the Tenth Circle.

Better read reviewers of this book who have read the poem (either in English translation or the Italian original) have commented that Picoult takes her characters on that same, metaphorical journey, ending with the Tenth Circle. And with that cryptic comment, what of the plot of the book?

Fourteen-year-old Trixie (short for Beatrice, ie Dante’s beloved) Stone is a very bright student in a US public high school in Maine. She falls head-over heels in love with 17-year-old Jason Underhill, star of the school’s hockey team. When he dumps her for a new romantic interest her grades plummet, she begins to cut herself. She has a brief one-night reunion with Jason during a party when she tries to win him back – and then accuses him of rape.

Jason says she was willing, that she asked for it. Most of the students support their hero, Jason. Meanwhile, what of Jodi’s parents? Her mother, Laura, a professor who lectures in Dante at college, is having an affair with one of her students. Her father, Daniel, is a comic book illustrator (we get several illustrations done by graphic artist Dustin Weaver – that I could well have done without – scattered throughout this book) who, after a troubled and turbulent childhood as the only white boy in the village of Alaskan Inuit people, where his mother is the village schoolteacher, has morphed into a mild-mannered, stay at home husband who raises Trixie.

Trixie runs away to Alaska, her parents follow – at which point, I gave up. The story was too long drawn out, the twists and turns confused: was Trixie raped, or was she out for revenge? The picture painted in this book of life in a public high school in the US certainly seems as near to Hell as makes no difference – for the girls, if not for the boys.

On the whole, I found this a most disappointing book. But if a metaphorical journey through Dante’s Inferno in US high school life complete with the trials and tribulations of teenagers is your cup of cocoa tea, as I mentioned before, you’ll find The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult at Nigel R Khan, Bookseller – and I hope you enjoy it more than I did.