The Help

I just finished reading The Help last week and I thought that the book was very well written and seemed to do a good job of documenting the lives of its characters.  Our copy of the book suggests a rather long comparison to To Kill A Mockingbird, but I don't think this book is anywhere near that level.  The stories and characters evoke comparison, but Harper Lee's writing was something else all together.  There were times that I felt like Kathryn Stockett was a big bogged down in the details when she could have been focusing on the characters and emotions more.  There has been some controversy around the book being a "feel good white girl's" story and I think that definitely applies to the movie, but not so much the book.  One suggestion was to balance the book with a reading of Eudora Welty's Where Is The Voice Coming From?.  I thought that was an interesting exercise as both Stockett and Welty present different views of the same historical event, the murder of Medgar Evers.  

The thing that stuck with me through everything, ultimately, was what an evil woman Hilly Holbrook was.  Without going into detail Hilly Holbrook is the main antagonist in the story (it could be argued that society was the main antagonist) and to put it mildly she is a bitch.  I have no doubt that people as racist as she was and worse were present in Jackson at that time, but what really made her despicable was how conniving and manipulative she was.  A friend asked whether the book was violent or had any sexual abuse in it and I told her no, but I felt like the actions of the women to each other was harder to read.  For some reason the emotional torment that people exact upon each other is far more difficult to cope with than the physical torment.  In the end I was left feeling that in my personal literary history Hilly Holbrook is likely one of the top 10 worst villains.  

In a way I feel bad that my primary takeaway from the story was the misdeeds of a white woman when the worst part was the mistreatment of the black maids.