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Kerre’s Cafe
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Today’s chat with guest host Susan Wood features a beautiful novel by an American novelist, Kathryn Stockett.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
In writing The Help, which is the story of black women servants and the white women they work for in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, Stockett drew on her own experience of growing up with a black maid who was treated like a member of her family. In this debut novel, Skeeter, a Jackson native, returns to her hometown fresh from an enlightening four years at university.
Skeeter is progressive, open-minded and tolerant – the other white women in the town, including her mother, are markedly less so. Skeeter, seeking a writing career through a New York publishing house, sets out to write a book filled with first-person accounts by black maids of their experiences serving the white families of Jackson. In doing so, they are risking everything, and the novel is taut with the tension this risk creates.
Jackson was a pivotal location in the US civil rights movement, and Stockett weaves into her fiction real events: Rosa Parks’ Montgomery bus boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, and the assassination by a white supremacist of activist Medgar Evers, a Jackson native. One of the most moving scenes in the book is that of a black family sitting around a radio, listening to coverage of the shooting of Evers, as his body lies in his driveway just streets away. They are too afraid to venture outside and risk being seen by white townsfolk.
At times in the novel, the depth of blacks’ fear will stun you, seem almost ridiculous, an overreaction to prejudice. But a particularly compelling passage – one cemented utterly in the gruesome fact of countless historical episodes – involving the consequences of a young black man using a whites-only bathroom, will remind you why the fear was justified. It’s a book revolving around women, but anyone with an interest in American history, and especially the history of race, should read it. (Warning: it will make you seriously question how Barack Obama ever ascended to the office of President.)
One Day by David Nicholls
The second review is of One Day, the latest novel from British writer David Nicholls, who moves on from the 20s-angst theme of his two earlier books (including Starter for 10, adapted into a film starring James McAvoy) with a jolly clever plot device that I had never before encountered. One Day follows the lives of Emma and David, who hooked up once on 15 July 1988 (the night of their graduation from university), by checking in with them every 15 July in each of the 20 years afterwards. Where are they? Who are they with? Are they in touch with each other or estranged? Are they meant to be together? What happens when they have to face the grown-up pressures of their 30s, and worse yet, their 40s?
It was rather reminiscent of the top-rating UK TV dramedy Cold Feet (which, incidentally, Nicholls appeared in during his earlier career as an actor), and having liked that show, I found One Day thoroughly engrossing. I desperately wanted to find out how it would all end, so I ripped through it in a couple of sittings – and was highly entertained along the way.
Tags: David Nicholls, Kathryn Stockett, Kerre's Cafe Reviews, Stephanie Jones, Susan Wood
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