The Help
author: Kathryn Stockett
name: Paul
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/03
date added: 2011/11/03
shelves: novel
review:
It’s hard to know what to think about a book like The Help. It does an awful lot of the things that books sometimes do to make me dislike them: It ignores reasonable consequence (and therefore drama) in favor of feel-good schmaltz; it broadcasts its plot and developments with screaming neon and signal flares; it features a plucky heroine, who also happens to be a writer that manages to save the day… by writing; it reads like a screenplay that was adapted into a novel rather than the other way around. But then again, despite (or perhaps because of) these factors, The Help is ridiculously, compulsively readable. A huge portion of that is owed to Kathryn Stockett‘s ability to characterize her principals and make them feel alive, so while The Help, on the surface, seems to struggle against what I want in a novel, I can’t deny that it is entertaining.
The Help is the story of Aibileen and Minny, two black maids working in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962 for sub-minimum wage cleaning rich white women’s houses, cooking their food, and caring for their children. Both of them suffer indignity and abuse at the hands of their employers but they do what they do because it affords them the money to live and there are parts of the job—mostly involving the white children they practically raise—that do have appeal. Enter Skeeter Phelan, recent college grad with aspirations of being a writer who hits on the idea of telling the story of what it’s like to be a black maid working in the South. She convinces Aibileen and Minny to tell their stories and the three of them risk it all so that voices may be heard and, perhaps, change may come.
Here’s my biggest problem with The Help: As engaging as Ms. Stockett’s writing is, as charming as the novel can be, the story here isn’t the one that ought to have been told. The real story would have been for Stockett to write the story that her characters write, to ignore the fictionalization and focus on real black maids working in the South during the civil rights movement. Even the hinted-at story that Aibileen’s deceased son began of black men working for white employers in the early 1960s would have been a more effective tale, at least in terms of social relevance, than this. It disturbs me quite a lot that there is a blurb on the cover from NPR about this book being the next To Kill a Mockingbird. If this is what we have accomplished since Harper Lee‘s novel, we have fallen far indeed. Because to me writing now, in the early 21st century, about racial conditions in the mid-20th century, feels incredibly easy. Lee’s novel addressed racial issues that were still prevalent—heavily prevalent—in 1960 when it was published. I’d be a fool if I suggested that racism wasn’t a problem now, but overt institutional racism as depicted in The Help is no longer the societal norm that it was fifty years ago, much less the sort of problem that a subtler variety infecting modern prejudices can really be compared to. This results in a book that, on the surface at least, is socially relevant but upon closer inspection is repeating lessons learned so long ago they have been absorbed into the foundational levels of decorum already rendering the book, at best, trite.
At which point I might almost say, “Well, so what?” It could just be a light, entertaining read, after all. But then I have to point out the fact that Stockett writes the point-of-view chapters for Aibileen and Minny in a pseudo-dialectical fashion that is so off-putting as to coat two-thirds of the book in a sour film of embarrassment. It’s not even that Stockett tried to write the way black people in the south might or might have talked back then but that she does so in an awful, half-committed style that reads as painfully as it would be to listen to a white public speaker inflect a black dialect. It is in that grating black-through-white-voice fashion that much of the book is told and while eventually as a reader I was able to adjust (around a third of the way in) and just use the ham-fisted stylistic mechanism to affect a character voice in my head, it never once stopped feeling gross to have to do so. Not to mention the fact that while Stockett takes some measure to ensure that Skeeter is presented as somewhat flawed in her own racial attitudes herself, she still comes across as kind of a white savior to the poor black folk who need a champion.
I have to wonder how much of the discomfort I had with either tactic comes from my knowledge that Ms. Stockett herself is white and that clearly Skeeter is a self-insertion mouthpiece. Would the dialect writing bother me if they had been written by a black author? After all, it’s not offensive to me that Irvine Welsh dumps a heavy, phonetic Scottish brogue into his novels, perhaps because he himself is Scottish. I can’t know though, because I do know Stockett is white and, again, her black dialect sounds white-doing-black. Would Skeeter’s character sit as ill if I didn’t know Stockett practically is Skeeter? I don’t know if the inclusion of the Acknowledgments or the Too Little, Too Late segments as postscripts after the novel text helped or hurt my opinion of the book. It frustrated me to hear how little concern she had with historical accuracy (in a historical novel!) and to learn that her life mirrored Skeeter’s so closely. Yet it was good to hear that she worried about affecting the voice of people who deserve to have their stories told, with very good reason.
I suppose in the end I can’t criticize The Help too much for failing to be what it could have been. I guess that’s like saying The Bell Jar is flawed because it doesn’t include the psychological background of chronic depression or 1984 is lacking because it doesn’t include a counterpoint identifying the positive aspects of oligarchy. Still, I wanted better from The Help than I got.