The Help: Holy Hateful Housewives!

Before I start in... I want to offer a disclaimer: these discussions will contain spoilers.  I'm not going to waste time or effort with summaries.  Often it will be important to have read the book being discussed before reading the corresponding entry!  But I'm not the book police. Sure, reading the entry first or as an alternative is right down there with watching the movie before reading the book. That's between you and the literature.

Also - I read this book via Kindle.  No response to this experience yet, but an explanation is forthcoming, believe you me.

To be perfectly honest, I didn't want to enjoy it.  Something inside of me wants to find fault with any book so universally loved as Stockett's novel (her first, by the way).  I liked the bulk of it, and even though that's definitely a luke-warm review for someone who usually goes black or white with her opinions on a book, I want this blog to be critical with substance and not just an outlet for inexplicable feelings.

Let's talk about happy endings.

The tail end of the novel contains a section explaining Stockett's own experience growing up in the South with a black "family maid," Demetrie.  The entire however many pages (grumble to the page-number-less Kindle) is a mix of self-congratulations and lame "I could be wrong" cop-out.  One of my absolute favorite activities is researching the lives of authors after reading their books in an effort to see where the lines of reality and fiction may have crossed.  Aside from taking all of the fun out of that particular hunt, "Too Little, Too Late:  Kathryn Stockett, in her own words" commits the heinous crime of handing the reader a tidy package of "what to take from this piece."  Stockett even goes so far as to put in a final plug for her favorite line of the book... completely unnecessary since it was already italicized in the original text... asking "Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people.  Not that much separates us.  Not nearly as much as I'd thought." Again, please forgive the lack of page numbers.  That about does it, I guess.  Not only does it hinder my reading of the book by damaging my impression of the author (I know this is not ideal, but authorial credibility completely influences my analysis of a piece of literature), but it implies that her work can be simplified to a single, intensely cliche statement.  Bummer.

Say I could forgive and forget about "Too Little, Too Late" and concentrate solely on the body of the text.  Stockett's character development is adequate with some characters and admirable with others.  Some are stock, for sure.  We have at least one vapid drone of a friend in Elizabeth, incapable of independent thought until the very end, when she fires Aibileen.  I wanted more from Lou Anne as a foil to Elizabeth.  She only came into focus as an independent thinker toward the end of the novel and I would have enjoyed more variety than the "evil" Hilly, the "good" Skeeter, and the easily-swayed Elizabeth.  It's my need for symmetry... which makes me a nasty hypocrite when I criticize Stockett's "tidy" ending.  Oh well.  It's my blog, so I win.

I'm extremely torn by the happily neutral tone at the end of the novel for a couple different reasons.  Minny is off to stay with her cousin to escape the abusive Leroy, Aibileen is optimistic about her future in the unknown, Skeeter is headed to New York, Hilly is kept at bay and might be convinced to think twice about her actions in the future, and even Celia and Johnny Foote have reached a new level of honesty with each other and a healthier plane in their marriage.  It feels good with a hint of sadness, because the reader can easily suspect that one or more of these scenarios will play out to be negative.  On one hand, this comfortable simplification seems to detract from the gravity of the setting.  These different demographics interacted in a wide variety of volatile ways that are well-known, but Stockett chose to imagine the situation of a historically quiet group.  The side-swipe-ish overview of their lives seems vaguely insulting, like Stockett, as a real-life rich, white child from Jackson, Mississippi couldn't possibly have even the slightest grasp of the surreal factors that affected these people on a day-to-day basis.  On the flip side of that coin, this book is immensely popular, which may mean that the author found an ideal balance between harsh truth and possible redemption, allowing the reader to exhale and imagine the best in order to sleep at night.  In a way, the focus on Skeeter's internal struggle as she battles with the guilt of writing her book as a white woman is genius.  It allows the reader to believe that Stockett understood that she was not the ideal person to tell this story, but that she was the only person available to try.  She even made Minny Skeeter's most critical co-conspirator; a co-conspirator who, coincidentally, seems to bare the strongest resemblance to Stockett's childhood maid, Demetrie.  The author allowed herself the comfort of writing in Demetrie's overall support of her mission as Minnie's initial resistance and eventual sacrifice, as her insistence at including the story of "two-slice Hilly" in the book as insurance.

This is not a book that allows me to like or dislike, which works because I insist that you ask more of me than a five second "You should read this book because..."  At worst, this book is overly simplistic.  At best, its simplicity compelled me to think that much more about what it meant.

Up next on my reading list?  I'm going to finally, and with some hesitance, tackle a book by one of my mom's favorite authors: Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible.