The Help

American Literature often wrestles with the gap between theory and practice. We are a nation founded on wonderful ideals, but we so often fail to live up to them. In particular, how can the nation that declares "all men are created equal" have such an awful history of racial oppression?

My American Lit class gives a sweeping view of race relations through study of Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Martin Luther King Jr's Letter From a Birmingham Jail. Now I've found the perfect novel to round out my recommended "civil rights reading list:" The Help by Kathryn Stockett. This 2009 release portrays the life of black domestic servants in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s.

I received The Help for Christmas and devoured it in 3 days. I found the story so compelling that I was 60 pages in before I realized that the novel was written in the first person, present tense - my least favorite narrative style! The book is narrated by three different women - two black maids and one white journalist. Stockett created such a believable, intimate voice for each that you are swept into their thoughts and emotions with ease. Her use of dialect is particularly admirable. Instead of being a distracting jumble of apostrophes and misspellings, it is seamlessly and subtly presented so that you hear the dialect in your head without working at it. 

The Help is not a pleasant book to read. The prejudice, violence, and justice portrayed are unsettling, to say the least. And yet, as characters begin to slowly build bridges across the "great divide" of black and white, you find hope and glimpses of redemption in a fallen world. 

My primary criticism of the novel is the abrupt ending that doesn't successfully diffuse the almost unbearable amount of built up tension. However, despite the slightly unsatisfying ending, the book is very well done and I highly recommend it.