A Great Hear (or Why I’m Now Multi-Tasking With Eyes and Ears, in Cyberspace)

The Help (Kathryn Stockett) has been clogging up all possible venues—print, electronic, audio—since it was published in 2009. At our annual Christmas party and book-pick, where every member of the P-Town book group must come armed with some kind of food and two solid book recommendations, we usually end up considering ~30 books for the next 11 month cycle; this time, half of the nominators came armed with The Help. It was like a literary electoral landslide. I had it on my list even though while it was residing peacefully on my Kindle in audio-book form, I hadn’t really gotten all that interested in actually reading it. I nominated it because it had gotten stellar reviews, sounded interesting, and I figured maybe getting on the to-be-read list might actually make me read it.

With 50% of the group lobbying for it, it obviously made the cut and June was our The Help month. As I have mentioned in prior posts, too much fame tends to put me off, so I avoided getting going until 5 days before our meeting. And then, I realized that I only had it in audio form and maybe I would like it better if I read it, after all. But I’m trying not to spend money on hard copy or even electronic books for my Kindle, because I’m in between earning sources this year: severance and unemployment are long gone, and I decided to wait on Social Security until I can get the full amount, which will be next month. So: be frugal! The public library and Kindles don’t have a good relationship at the moment—although Amazon.com assures us that by the end of 2011, they will update their operating system to allow library eBook downloads and then the world will be a much sunnier place. Until then, live with it, suckers! However, after attending a little workshop recently at the library on electronic books, I realized that I can reserve and download an eBook onto my laptop, even if it still speaks a language foreign to the Kindle. So, 5 days before our June meeting, I grabbed an eBook from Overdrive.com and was set to go. I figured that between an eBook and an audio book on my Kindle, one or the other of them would work.

Ha! 5 pages into the audio book, I realized I was completely hooked. The audio book has an unusual amount of narrators—usually, 1 person just does all the various voices in an audio book, by being excellent actors. But for The Help, and I don’t know why, Audible.com decided to go with 4 different narrators. And each of them does an exceptional good job. But because there is a lot of dialect dialog, I noticed that I was occasionally not sure what someone had said. So then I thought I would open up the eBook so that I could look up the occasional missed word. And voila! A new form of reading was born: reading along while a virtual play was being performed just for me in my own living room. While I was dressed like a hobo. I finally settled on listening, doing some needlepoint, and following along in the eBook so I could just look up when I wasn’t 100% sure of what I heard.

Would I have taken this much trouble for just a so-so book? Nope. But The Help is an amazing book, and, even more surprising, it’s the author’s first novel. I’m going to assume that if I know about the general idea, you all do too, so I won’t go into any great details except to say that this is what I loved about it:

*Believable characters--although there are some that are possibly a bit over the top—just the nasty ones though, and who doesn’t like someone that you really get to hate, full-on? The author placed a couple of really evil people squarely in the middle of the action, who take great pleasure in messing things up badly for everyone else

*Beautiful structure—the novel has 3 separate rotating narrators, and their individual voices are really handled distinctly. When Skeeter is narrating, or Aibeleen, or Minny, it’s always immediately clear who is carrying the story burden at that moment. And the use of shifting perspectives on the main events of the story really adds depth and complexity to what might otherwise have been a decent but still one-sided account.

*Engrossing story—by setting the story in 1964 in Jackson, Mississippi, the author does something that is really magical for folks that are our age. While I don’t think any of us lived in highly segregated worlds, there was still a clear line drawn between plain old vanilla white people and everyone else, and the Caucasians were firmly in charge. Most of the families of the women in the P-town book group had hired help when they were growing up in the 60s and early 70s, and most of them felt like their hired help were kind of surrogate mothers or grandmothers. Still, I think that that world no longer exists. But in 1964, things were starting to change, and I remember that change really well. I remember the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I remember the march on Washington, I remember the “I Have a Dream” speech, and I obviously remember the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath. The events in The Help take place almost 50 years ago, but we were there and beginning (I think) to use our brains. There’s a scene when someone introduces the rebellious white girl, Skeeter, to Bob Dylan. I mentioned in the book group that my boyfriend at that time made me listen to Bob D’s first album when I visited him at home in Boston the summer after my first year of college, which was in 1964. And our most erudite member, the main librarian for the Stanford Business School, said that that was exactly how she first learned about Bob Dylan—she grew up in Boston and her boyfriend in 1964 told her the guy was going to be a god, so listen up! I told my boyfriend that I didn’t think Dylan’s voice was good enough for him to have a real commercial career. See, even then, I was colossally wrong about emerging trends!

There are some bad things that happen to good people in the book, and, gratifyingly, some really nasty things eventually happen to the bad guys, too. There are really heart-wrenching moments, and I have to admit that, by listening to it which always makes the narrative much more immediate, I had a mini-meltdown toward the end of the book and had to take a little time off so I’d stop weeping and let the story play out. But I can’t think of anything I’ve read recently that made me cry. Yes, I do cry at telephone commercials and fast-forward through any TV plea to help abused animals. But not typically when reading.

The movie version of The Help will be out in August. Sadly, I realized that I didn’t recognize any of the actors playing the younger roles, although I recognize ALL of the ones playing the older generation: Mary Steenburgen, Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney, Viola Davis, and Cecily Tyson. Can’t wait. Even if it’s disappointing, which is often the case, I still think I’ll see it.

So: final recommendation. Buy it! I think this WILL be one I will want to re-read (re-hear?) again, particularly after or maybe before the movie comes out.

(Editorial note:  Written by Susan, posted by Ann)