Asperger's is murder in Jodi Picoult's 'House Rules'

HOUSE RULES, by Jodi Picoult. Atria, 532 pp, $28.

An 11-year-old girl - a precocious reader - was visiting my home a few weekends ago. She noticed the review copy of Jodi Picoult's 17th novel, "House Rules," on my coffee table and said that she'd liked some of Picoult's other works. I told her this new novel was wonderful.

Big mistake.

Shyly, she asked if she could borrow it. I'm an educator, someone inclined to applaud a young person's thirst for reading. But I grabbed that fat review copy out of the kid's paws so fast she didn't have time to blink. The possessive hoarder who wants to keep all good books within reach had been awakened. Hey, if this 11-year-old wunderkind has absorbed anything from her reading, she's surely learned the fundamental lesson of Picoult's fictional families: Life's tough.

In "House Rules" Picoult keeps so many story line streamers whirling in the air that it would be easy just to praise her technical mastery. But what most readers will cherish is the character of Jacob Hunt, an 18-year-old high school student with Asperger's syndrome. (Jacob, in goofy teen fashion, jokes: "Asperger's. I mean, doesn't it sound like a Grade Z cut of meat? Donkey on the barbecue?")

Asperger's rules Jacob's life and the lives of his resentful but guilty younger brother, Theo, and his wry and exhausted mom, Emma. (Dad fled the coop long ago.) Emma ensures that a sense of routine - so crucial to Jacob's emotional well-being - is strictly maintained from week to week. His clothes are color-coded in his closet; his diet is restricted, since glutens and caseins spark meltdowns. As Emma observes: "I bet I could have a top-rated show on the Food Network: Alimentary Autism. Jacob doesn't share my culinary enthusiasm. He says that I'm what you'd get if you crossed Jenny Craig with Josef Mengele."

What propels "House Rules" out of Picoult's home category of the sharply observed domestic drama and into the overlapping genre of crime fiction is that Jacob nurses an obsession with forensic science. Thanks to his mom's ill-thought-out birthday gift of a police scanner radio, Jacob has even turned up at a couple of crime scenes, unnerving the police with his Asperger's-related reluctance to make eye contact, as well as his detailed knowledge of rigor mortis and blood-spatter patterns. So, when Jacob's tutor - a lovely college student who's been working with him on his social skills - is found dead, the police (and even Emma and Theo) suspect that Jacob's obsession with crime scenes may have led him to stage one of his own.

Inspired plot twists ensue. But, again, it's Jacob who will linger with readers. Desperate to connect with other people and yet hampered in his ability to do so, he is painfully glassed off from the world of his peers, as well as from most adults. Picoult's superb novel makes us inhabit Jacob's solitude and abide his yearning.