The Destruction of the Idyll: Linda Castillo’s and Jodi Picoult’s Amish Crime Fiction

Abstract

The present article discusses recent developments in American crime fiction, namely the so-called Amish mysteries by Linda Castillo and Jodi Picoult. The aim is to show that although Castillo’s and Picoult’s fiction has been termed ethnic crime writing, the way these writers make use of the Amish setting does not serve the primarily educational purposes of raising awareness about a specific ethnic group as was the case with the older generation of ethnic crime writers (such as Tony Hillerman and P.L. Gaus). Employing Bakhtin’s idyllic chronotope (a concept most often critically applied to classic works but shown here as a versatile instrument for discussing genre literature as well) as a point of reference, the paper further analyzes how the narratives invoke this familiar spatial model and initiate its violation. It argues that the writers’ narrative strategies serve to achieve the sharpest contrast between the idyllic place of love, family and labor and the hideous crimes committed there, implying that the idyllic rurality is either too fragile to be attainable or that its existence is a mere deception.