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No parent should ever have to deal with teen suicide!

The Hartes and the Golds had been neighbours and best friends for 18 years. So it was no surprise that their children, Emily Gold, a talented young artist, and Chris Harte, a bright, motivated athlete and the star of his high school swimming team, would also grow up as inseparable best friends. Emily and Chris, born only scant weeks apart, bonded even as infants and grew up as close together as two non-siblings possibly could be. What Emily knew, Chris also knew and understood. When Chris was hurting, Emily also suffered and shared his pain. What Emily experienced, Chris also felt with a powerful bond of empathy that approached the strength of the almost surreal attachment that fraternal twins feel for one another. It came as no surprise to their parents, their teachers and their friends that their attachment, in the fullness of time, blossomed into a more mature romantic love that everyone around them fully expected would end in their eventual marriage to one another.

Emily told nobody, however, of the difficulties that she was encountering in dealing with the newer sexual side of her relationship with Chris. Perhaps it was the simple stress of living up to everybody's expectations of the future of their relationship. Perhaps it was the residual psychological stress of a close experience with sexual assault and rape when she was a much younger girl. Perhaps it was her disturbing sensation that sex with Chris was rather too akin to an incestuous relationship with a brother. Stress, confusion and mental turmoil lead to profound depression and despair with the conviction that the only escape was suicide. Of course, because Chris was the only person she felt she truly loved and could completely trust, she asked him to help her complete the act of suicide.

Any potential readers that are tempted to give vent to a storm of righteous indignation at my summary should sit back down, relax and be assured that I haven't given the game away here. The suicide itself takes place in the opening chapter and the underlying causes as I've summarized them likewise come as no surprise and are detailed very early in the story.

Fans of Jodi Picoult's novels will understand immediately that the mere details of this story are NOT the raison d'être for the novel. The story serves only as a backdrop for the exploration of the complexity of the surrounding issues - teen suicide; the responsibility of parents, teachers and peers to recognize the signs of depression and to act upon the near occasion of suicide; the moral difficulties of assisted suicide; the nature of friendship; the stress exerted by parental, teacher and peer pressure; and the difficulties encountered by the survivors of a suicide.

Having said that the story itself was not really top billing in the novel, I have to give Picoult full credit for her marvelous portrayal of some absolutely electric courtroom scenes and Chris Harte's trial for capital murder. The description of his time spent in prison and the relationship that he develops with his cell-mate is absolutely heartbreaking and certainly qualifies as first-rate storytelling. On the other hand, my impression of THE PACT overall is that it is considerably weaker than some of Picoult's other efforts such as MY SISTER'S KEEPER or NINETEEN MINUTES. Some rather lame dialogue, an overly lengthy exposition in the central part of the novel and my personal difficulty in believing that Chris Harte would have chosen to deal with the issue entirely on his own detract from the overall effect of the novel.

But, make no mistake, a poor day with a Jodi Picoult novel is still a very sunny day in a literary world clouded with sub-standard choices. I'm a confirmed fan. Now that I've found her work, I'm looking for another one to read post haste.

Paul Weiss