The Help

I finally read The Help, by Kathryn Stockett.  It was a compelling read, with much suspense and a real sense of the danger that Aibileen, Minny and the other maids were courting through their covert writing project.  The beating and blinding of one maid’s son for using a white bathroom provides a serious counterpoint to the ridiculous notion of the Junior League President that all households should have separate bathrooms for the help, ‘for sanitary reasons.’ One felt that even Skeeter, the young white woman who persuades the maids to tell their storis, might be in serious trouble, but there is also a sense of change trickling down, even to the provincial backwater that Jackson seemed to be. One of the strengths of the book is an undercurrent of national and even local events – of social upheaval on many fronts – hearing a Bob Dylan song, learning of Martin Luther King’s march on Washington. This premonition of the future is most poignantly expressed when Aibileen says goodbye to ‘her last white baby’, Mae Mobley, and has a visionof the modern world that Mae will inhabit. (In the fictional book, “Help”, that is being written by Skeeter and the maids, the editor declares that the best section is by Sarah, Aibileen’s pseudonym, and her voice is the one that I remember most from the book.)  The ending was a bit patched together, with Skeeter heading off to New York, her Mother apparently not dying, and the maids piecing their lives back together somehow.  While not entirely believable, the interwoven stories from different viewpoints works pretty well; however, it is disconcerting to have one chapter, the Junior League benefit where so many of the plotlines come together, suddenly in the third person, with an omniscient narrator telling us what different people were doing and thinking.  I also wonder if it would have been a better book with just two viewpoints -  Aibileen’s and Skeeter’s; it would have been harder to write but I think it would have been a stronger. All in all, though, the writing was good, with many insights into actions and motivations and a lot of humor. Elizabeth not recognizing herself in the book was perfect!  So, between, the topic, the times – early sixties in the South–and the characters, it adds up to a good, even an important book, well worth reading.