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I violated all my reading rules with Kathryn Stockett's The Help. Why? I'd read a blurb in Entertain Weekly (great place for book reviews, BTW) that said the book had been passed over by 26 agents and was now on the best-seller lists. Man! Them be words any rejected writer likes to hear! So last Wednesday afternoon I bought the book, put down the one I was reading and started The Help. Saturday night I finished it. Wow! A book after my own heart.

It's set in 1963/64 Mississippi and looks at the interactions between well-off southern families and their "help," which consists of African-American women. Structurally, the story is told by three narrators: Skeeter, the young southern woman who has the idea to write a book about how the help sees their employers, and Abileen and Minny, two of the maids. I figure that last bit, using black women as narrators, is why so many agents turned the book down. White writers messing around with black dialects can get in a lot of trouble. My guess is those agents didn't want to take the risk.

Lots of dog-eared pages. Let's see which ones contain things I still want to talk about.

1) Miss Picky did way too much reading on linguistics while she was teaching at A&M, including one book titled Black English. It made an attempt to explain aspects of various black dialects by comparing them African languages. One I remember is that in several of those languages, there's no need to put an "s" at the end of the noun if the speaker has already said there's more than one. Thus, rapper 50 cent illustrates this rule. When Ms Stockett has Aibleen say, "I got thirteen dollars and fifty cents" (page 15), neither "s" is needed.

2) Skeeter's mother, a southerner-to-the-core, comes into the living room where Skeeter and the maid, Pascagoula, are watching a newscast covering James Meredith's entrance into Ole Miss. Pascagoula leaves the room immediately. I find the dialogue that follows her exit a good example of characterization through speech and action.
Action + dialogue = character. Proven theory.

3) I ran across many nicely turned phrases. In one Skeeter talks about the honest relationship she and her friend Hilly have had and concludess, "With other people Hilly turns out lies like the Presbyterians hand out guilt." (page 80) Cool.

4) Often I recognized myself in some character. Hilly shows Skeeter a picture of a blind date she, Hill, has arranged. Skeeter studies the picture. "He had clear open eyes, light brown curly hair, was the tallest in a group of men by a lake. But his body was half-hidden by the others. He must not have all his limbs." (page 113) I'll match Skeeters there-has-to-be-something-wrong feeling and raise her two. Before I left for college, I received a picture of my roommate-to-be. Beautiful girl, seated on a couch in a blue party dress. Tiara in her hair. My first thought? OMG! She must not have any legs.

5) In a Minny-narrated section, Minny learns that Abileen is considering working with Skeeter on the book about the maids. Minny's thoughts:
Wow! IMHO.

6) Minny meets the husband of the woman she's working for. "And he is sort of handsome. For a white man." (page 139) Amused me. At A&M I worked with a black lady who used to say Clark Gable was "sort of handsome. For a white man." OK. Maybe it was the memory that amused me.

7) Skeeter, on her way to visit Albideen at her home, thinks, "The colored part of town seems so far away when, evidently, it's only a few miles from the white part." (page 143) Bet that's true in a lot of places.

8) In another Minny-narrated section, Minny tries to pinpoint why she is telling her experiences as a maid to Skeeter rather than joining some of the more famous protests that are in the news. "… truth is, I don't care that much about voting. I don't care about eating at a counter with white people. What I care about is, if in ten years, a white lady will call my girls dirty and accuse them of stealing the silver." (page 218) Protection of family. Surely that's a motive anyone can grasp.

9) To me, there's nothing more impressive than a writer who can make me feel something and then, in less than a page, turn that emotion around. Abileen talks about a family she used to work for where the child, a very young boy, showed confusion about pronouns—and other things.
Amused by the first paragraph, I was in tears by the end of the second.

10) At one point in the book Skeeter tries to humiliate Hilly by having a large number of toilets placed on her front yard. (Yes, the event does work in the plot, but explaining it would take too long. Trust me. Please.) Later Skeeter writes, "When I started typing out her bathroom initiative for the newsletter, typing words like disease and protect yourself and you're welcome!, something cracked open inside of me, not unlike a watermelon, cool and soothing and sweet. I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around it." (page 345) Interesting.

The Help is good. Ignore that it's on the best-seller list and that the cast for the movie is already being selected and announced. Read it anyway. You'll like it. Trust me.