Recommended Reading: "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett

A few months ago I received an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) that intrigued me less because of its lovely cover design than because it is the first offering from a new imprint, Amy Einhorn Books (Penguin/Putnam). When you're putting your name on the spine, especially in these trying book times, your maiden offering has to be something very special.

Fortunately, The Help, a debut novel from Kathryn Stockett, is something very rare: A work of near-literary fiction that has the accessibility and warmth of what we tend to call "women's fiction" (when I figure out exactly what "women's fiction" is besides marginalized, I'll let you know). 

I say "near-literary" because I think Stockett stops short of what the best literary fiction accomplishes. I won't attempt to define literary fiction, but one of the things it does do is allow inner lives to show without telling. There's a great deal of telling in The Help, and not all of it is worthwhile. We might, for example, be able to understand more about Aibileen, the first African-American housekeeper we meet in Stockett's early-1960s Jackson, Mississippi, if we saw more of her in her own home and in her own element. Stockett works very hard on making the black maids' chapters authentic, writing in dialect and from their perspectives. I'll let other critics cavil about the authenticity of the dialect -- whether or not Stockett got it exactly right, she did make it consistent, and I found it helped rather than hurt my reading. 

What hurt my reading was being kept out of Aibileen and Minnie's lives, yet on reflection I wondered (and this is my greatest weakness as a book reviewer -- I reflect and forgive too much) if that doesn't illuminate something about their lives in itself. Stockett, who writes in her Afterword about her own upbringing by a black maid named Demetrie, says that she didn't know much about her beloved caregiver's life or what it was like. Stockett says she wrote her book in part to fill in that gap. 

But women like Demetrie -- and Aibileen, and Minnie -- had to guard what small amount of private life they could. They were too accustomed to their time, strength, and knowledge being co-opted by the women (and men -- after all, they were the ones paying the bills, even if they spent most of their time avoiding "the help" or acting as if their wives' housekeepers were their personal nursemaids) who employed them to allow those women or their children much trespass into their private lives. Stockett does acknowledge this in the book's scenes that take place at Aibileen and Minnie's homes; the two maids are reluctant to allow Miss Skeeter, the increasingly liberal college-grad town daughter, to enter their houses. Skeeter, of course, thinks of this in terms of her own safety. Aibileen and Minnie know it's actually for their own.

Stockett's wisdom in choosing these liminal early years of a landmark Civil Rights decade is really an accident  of birth. Like Mae Mobley, the toddler in Aibileen's charge, Kathryn Stockett was a tiny girl in 1960s Mississippi. But sometimes, knowing that your Fortuna-given perspective has a kind of power is wisdom. Regardless of the mistakes Stockett makes in dialect and nuance, her willingness to try and fill in the gap between her life and Demetrie's is a worthy and beautiful thing. 

Comments

[S. Krishna]

What a great review! I can't wait to read this one.

[MavenLady]

Thanks so much! It's such a powerful book, and I really can't wait to see what Stockett writes next.

[Kathy]

I can't wait to read this book. I was a tiny girl in Mississippi from 1961 to 1964 myself.

[LGroleau]

I have just spent the day reading The Help. It is a wonderful book and I will be thinking about the characters for a long time. I did not want the book to end. I wanted more!
Ottawa, Ontario CANADA

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