The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have ambivalent feelings about this book. I can see why it has had the effect it apparently has had in the US, because it is such an American story. Possibly only in South Africa might there have been anything similar - or, on second thoughts, in India during the Raj. So in terms of the subject matter I have no problem with it. Kathryn Stockett acknowledges the difficulties of writing through the mind of someone so unlike herself, and that's fine. If writers kept to their land, their gender, their class, their whatever - there would be little experimenting and little imagination. I cannot say if the language she employs for her black characters is true to life because American English is alien enough for British ears anyway, even with our familiarity with film, so we can be in no position to judge the rendition of the Black voices of the south. It's as a work of fiction that I take issue.

Perhaps this is down to her editors (maybe with an eye to a film in the making?) but this book is schematic. There are parallels screaming at every corner, loose ends nicely tidied up. And then, worst of all, for the book itself, the white characters are dreadful stereotypes. Yes, there are a few 'good' white employers mentioned, but only in passing. The main white characters are unremittingly ghastly, not only vile to their Helps but also to their children. They have not one single redeeming feature that would render them human. Their relationships with each other are unpleasant; their marriages are left untouched; all we get is their nastiness.

On the other side, the black women are only good. The fact that one of them, Minny, has a mouth on her is beside the point. She is a good sort, a good soul, brave and stalwart. There is not a mean thought among them. Meanwhile, lippy Minny is a battered wife - just to add a detail, the tough woman who lets herself be beaten up by her husband out of a sot of desperate dependency. All the boxes are being ticked here. He is even called Leroy, for god's sake!

Skeeter, the compiler of the book that is the core to the story is of course gawky, unlovely as a child, and a wannabe writer. I gather that this is based on Stockett's own history, but it is another stereotype. What doesn't ring true at all is how she can at any point have felt attracted to the senator's son, Stuart, whose views she knows to be so opposed to her own. I simply do not believe that anyone could contemplate a relationship, let alone a marriage, with a person whose outlook on the world is so fundamentally different. Incidentally, I felt the same way about the marriage in We Need To Talk About Kevin. There too I wondered, what is this woman doing married to that man?

In the end, my feeling about The Help was that the author was getting a lot off her chest, but that someone should have stepped in and rescued the book from being both mawkish and agitprop.



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