In consideration of my very preliminary observations made a few weeks ago, my esteemed colleagues and I resolved to acquire a copy of The Help and ascertain its eligibility for Book Club.

The process of acquisition is one fraught with some peril. Before the books can be read, they must be obtained; that means that we must face the probability of having to speak to another human being and explain why, exactly, we are purchasing this copy of The Da Vinci Code or Twilight. It would be too much to expect bookstore and library employees to just not care. They will either log us in their memory as the stupid jerks who read Dan Brown un-ironically or – probably worse – ask us what our favourite evil-albino-monk sequence was (or remark that OMG, did u ever think art history could be so exciting, lol).

There has been some discussion of using disguises. In most cases we have been fortunate enough to know someone who already owns a copy of whatever book we require. We are too polite to discuss our findings or opinions of it with them. Indeed The Da Vinci Code was a gift, The Kite Runner was a loan, and so on. Only Twilight and Eat, Pray, Love necessitated someone taking one for the team. Happily, The Help, too, was acquired without the need to alert any strangers to its changed hands.

Somewhat unhappily, it turns out that The Help will not be inducted into the records of Book Club, because it actually isn’t that bad! It really was the ideal candidate, especially now that the film version has launched and the marketing campaign is in full swing. I was even briefly excited by the opening (cringe-worthy) paragraphs.* “We have a winner!” I crowed. But we don’t. No winners, just a book that is pretty good, mostly.

There are a couple of ways in which The Help could really have fallen down and in so doing become a legitimate Book Club entry. The first, and most obvious, is with regards to the issue of race and class exploitation. Indeed, this issue ties into the majority of my subsequent observations about the novel. Both a cursory reading and an ungenerous one could interpret The Help as novel about a white middle class woman appropriating the stories of black working class women, written by a white middle class author (Kathryn Stockett) appropriating the stories of black working class women.

And it is that. It is, but it manages to be mostly sort of okay I think because Stockett recognizes the problem. The Help is a novel about navigating the murky waters of race, sex, and class segregation that we all participate in to some degree. Stockett seems to be attempting to confront the cognitive dissonance at work in a society that was so brutally segregated and yet so interconnected. This isn’t a period of history that I know very much about, and it seems insane that – as in this specific instance – white Americans could consider black Americans to be subhuman, and yet at the same time blithely employ black women to raise their children because they themselves couldn’t be bothered. It seems perhaps more insane that people on opposite sides of the race and class divide could develop – or presume to develop – bonds of affection for one another. I could be projecting my own consternation onto Stockett, but I believe that this is the thing (the problem) that she is trying to engage here.

David Denby at The New Yorker observes that The Help is “an act of both penance and self-congratulation.” Based on the novel and Stockett’s revealing afterword, I suspect that that is a legitimate criticism. Stockett notes that she was herself raised, in Jackson, Mississippi, in part by a black woman who was employed by Stockett’s parents. There is, therefore, some personal baggage at work in the novel. I was left with a favourable impression of The Help, and I want to be fair to Stockett here, because of what seems to be the sincerity of her project; Stockett seems to have written the novel as part of her attempt to articulate her own mixed feelings about her history and the history of her country (and naturally the persistent nature of class and race conflict). I think, perhaps, Stockett is trying to sort out how to be both white and at the same time good.

So that’s the penance part. The self-congratulation part manifests in the character of Skeeter, the white middle class aspiring writer who most likely serves as a bit of a stand-in for Stockett herself. Skeeter struggles with and confronts the (base, appalling) inequalities that defined segregation and that are present in her own presuppositions. However, Skeeter is both the ‘nice white person who saves the day for the poor black folks’ and also the ‘white person who is so naïve as to think that it’s okay for white people to swoop in and try to save the day for the poor black folks and recognizes in herself the same ugliness that she wants to help fight.’ So Skeeter/Stockett get to save the day, 50 years too late, but also mull over how problematic everything that they do and think really is.

So yeah I guess it’s pretty complicated or whatever.

It is further problematic that Stockett writes in the voices of black working class women. This raises the second possible issue: politics notwithstanding, sometimes books just aren’t written very well.

The Help’s jacket asserts that these voices are written “pitch-perfect.” I would argue that, regardless of Stockett’s intent, these represent the novel’s most significant fault. I already noted above that the book’s opening paragraph was weak. One could accurately observe that the ‘voices’ of Aibileen and Minny – the two black protagonists – are characterized by the presence of period slang and jargon that fulfills the expectations of negative racial stereotypes.** However, the fact remains that Stockett’s use of language bothered me less as the novel progressed and her characters were fleshed out. Admittedly, I am uncertain as to whether that means that Stockett’s writing improves during the course of the book or that the deciding factor is the relative humanity of the characters in question. The problem here is undeniable, but Stockett skirts a narrow line between creating authentic-seeming characters (for Jackson, Mississippi, 1962) and Jim Crow caricatures – in my opinion, which may not be the best,*** she mostly succeeds.****

Otherwise, Stockett’s writing is functional without being astonishing. It is short on ‘description’ and long on dialogue and action, which is more than fine as far as I am concerned. The ending is weak, but – sigh – so many endings are these days.***** There is a bit of a love story that seems like a real cliché to begin with, and ends up not really being one after all. There is a cartoonish, mustache-twirling villain that really causes the book to suffer, in consideration of the possibility that segregation might have been bad enough in itself. On the occasions that The Help engages the suffering felt by women, irrespective of class or race affiliation (domestic violence and glass ceilings, for instance), it feels legitimately real. Indeed the book is most successful when attempting to illustrate the shared burdens of being human (and much more importantly, being female). Stockett perhaps is aiming to suggest that empathy is the key to emancipation.

The Help is no classic. It is often clumsy, although it makes up for its faults with a sincerity of purpose. It is rife with political problems, but is written well enough to avoid failing because of them. If that seems like damning with faint praise, then fair enough. But I enjoyed the book; it made me think, it was hard to write about, and I respect Stockett’s willingness to do self-reflection. It could be worth a go, if read with an open and critical mind.

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*”Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning. But I ain’t never seen a baby yell like Mae Mobley Leefolt. First day I walk in the door, there she be, red-hot and hollering with the colic, fighting that bottle like it’s a rotten turnip.”

** Stockett’s persistent use of the word “Law,” instead of “Lord” bothered me most. For instance, ‘Law, that girl done messed up good and proper,” or what have you.

***Rosetta E. Ross at Religion Dispatches has a very critical response to The Help that I consider to be mostly unfair. Ross interprets three “false messages” in the book: 1) that “the real agents of the world are white;” 2) that the  “really important part of all cultural production” is for “white agency and dignity to be actualized;” and 3) that people of colour “exist primarily to serve or enhance the lives of white people.” These are criticisms that I would have leveled against The Help before I had read it. I am 100% behind the awareness of the ubiquity of ‘whiteness’ and ‘maleness’ as cultural norms in North American society – so I get where Ross is coming from. However, my understanding of The Help is that it is a sincere (but flawed) attempt to criticize the ‘false messages’ that Ross describes, not perpetuate them. This is especially true of the third message. Did Ross and I read the same book? Isn’t the point of The Help that unjust dynamics of power based on race affiliation are profoundly screwed up?

****Truthfully, none of the characters in The Help are exceptionally nuanced. However, Aibileen and Minny are, in my estimation, equal to Skeeter in their literary ‘quality.’

*****And actually, in the interest of fairness, the unsatisfactory nature of the ending could be intentional, in that it could be understood to illustrate the fact that no single ‘bestselling expose novel’ is sufficient to end poverty or racism or misogyny.