Desperate women

Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help, set in 1950s Mississippi and focusing on the interactions between the black household help and their white employers, was a huge success. It was made into a film that was also hugely successful. The book and film, though, were controversial: some people saw it as a white-savior story, some thought the black women were poorly fleshed out and served as background for the story of the white protagonist, some found the dialect spoken only by the black characters condescending, and some thought that it made institutional racism seem like an individual instead of societal problem.

I was not a fan of the book either, for the reasons above and more. The main character, Skeeter, was a young woman who had grown up in Mississippi with a black nanny, and at the end of the book, Skeeter writes a book called The Help. Skeeter. it is clear, is very much the author’s alter ego. Since the Skeeter character uniquely personifies ethics, kindness and is just simply not racist at all in the book, quite distinct from the characters around her, it all came across as rather smug. That said, The Help was quite readable, two of the black maids were strong characters, and the book was well paced.

Now, more than a decade later, Stockett has written another book, which will inevitably (for good and bad) be compared with The Help.

This novel, The Calamity Club, is set in the Depression Era of the 1930s. Mississippi has been hard hit, people are losing jobs, homes are being foreclosed upon for unpaid mortgages, and poverty is increasing rapidly. There are two main characters: Birdie is twenty-four, living in a tiny town with her mother and grandmother, struggling to survive. Then there is Meg, eleven years old and an orphan, abandoned by her mother. Neither Birdie nor Meg has a father in the picture. The novel is told via alternating chapters in their two voices.

The characters in this novel are almost all white, which suggests that Stockett has taken some of the criticism of The Help to heart. Birdie’s family is about to lose their house, so they send her north to Oxford, Mississippi, to beg money from her sister Frances who has married into a rich family. Oxford also happens to be the town where Meg’s orphanage exists, so eventually, Meg and Birdie meet.

There are definite parallels between The Calamity Club and The Help. Although much poorer, Calamity‘s Birdie is a lot like Help‘s Skeeter — loves books and reading (unlike all the other people around), just naturally un-racist (unlike all the other people around), observant but not necessarily activist about unfairness, too intellectual to be interested in clothes and shopping and parties (unlike all the other women around), spunky, original, and capable. Meg is an eleven-year-old version of the same.

Both books have a white woman who is the personification of racism, superiority, and general unpleasantness who gets her come-uppance at the end. In this novel, it is Gannett Pittman, who runs the orphanage and who has an ‘inexplicable’ hatred for little Meg. Meg is forced to eat alone, spend her days alone in a closed-up room covered with mold, and whipped for minor infractions. (The reader will probably figure out the reason for Gannet picking on Meg well before it is revealed.) The other rich white women who volunteer at the orphanage are (actually inexplicably) under Gannett’s thrall, and raise no awkward questions about her abuse of Meg and the other starving orphanage children. They happily go along with the idea of putting twelve-year-old white girls to work in a cannery for no pay.

Meanwhile, even the rich are beginning to have financial problems. Large houses and estates are being foreclosed upon, and Birdie’s supposedly rich brother-in-law also seems to be having financial problems. Meg somehow gets adopted into a rich family. Will she settle in there? Will Birdie get money from her sister’s marital family to save her own mother’s house? It seems like things are coming to a head.

At which point I was astonished to discover that 300 pages had passed, but I was only about 40% of the way through the book. There is a whole second section with Birdie in Oxford and Meg in her new family’s estate. There are still sections in both voices, but each one only has thin mentions of the other — it is as if the book split into two completely new books with two different plots barely tied together.

There is a definite slump at this point. Birdie and Meg’s mother convert the house into a brothel to make money, and the process of setting this up is long drawn-out. Each of the prostitutes hired for the brothel is described with their own background, and then there is the doctor who tests them, the process of getting condoms, how the house will be set up, on and on.

Meg’s new parents are alcoholic losers and their background is now laid out for the reader — the rich landowner grandparents who pay them a stipend, the mean and resentful other family members, the few kindly ones….

In the middle of all the trauma, an unlikely romance also springs up between Birdie and Jack, a married banker. Each character in the novel is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — often signalled by whether they read and love books or merely ‘nickel romances’ or none at all — and Jack is most definitely good. Of course, he is married, which you’d think would be a detriment, but he is working on divorcing his wife. He loves his children. He is tall and handsome and kind to the poor and elderly. He falls passionately for Birdie, but treats her with respect. And as the cherry on the cake, he will also force the bank to make decisions in Birdie’s favor (which seems awfully unfair to the rest of the poverty-stricken people around). The other male characters are negligible: this is a novel focused on women.

Stockett has done some research, and a major thread describes the horrible practice of sterilizing women who are ‘feeble-minded’, i.e. are poor, powerless, and have done something that displeased the moral majority. There are also subplots about homosexuality and racism and Prohibition and alcoholism, but the central theme is the oppression of women by men, and by complicit women.

As for the writing? Stockett uses Southern conversational style effectively:

I waited on Pripp to leave

[..] so she can adjust up the schedule [..]

The dialog seemed inconsistent, with the black characters speaking a phonetic dialect while the white characters varied between excellent TV English and slang.

[Picador, a black maid] Law, it’s hot this mawning.

[Birdie, a white woman who has grown up in a small Mississippi town] Believe me, Franny, we’re all very happy you married someone with money. You have no idea how happy we are. Though I’m still waiting on Daddy’s coffin to explode because you married a banker.

[Birdie’s mom, with the same background] Tell him we’n pay our tab if he’ll give you time off.

[Flossy, a white prostitute] One case a syph and fft. Doors closed.

Occasional sentences are baffling

I shut my eyes and stared her down — somehow managing to do both.

The Calamity Club is an adequate book: as with The Help, it is easy to read, and its largely cardboard characters are still often fun to read about. It’s an optimistic (if unrealistic) bootstraps story, filled with resourceful women. But it is way too long, and has way too many plotlines and stories packed into a single book, and, in my opinion, it has insufficient depth.

---