The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, 2009

It's a heartening thing that a novel like The Help has become a runaway blockbuster. Today's publishing world is a rather sad place, where James Patterson mysteries and Danielle Steele romances rule the roost. The Help is un-schmaltzy and it resolutely refuses to pander; it's not the kind of book that generally strikes a chord with a wide audience. Thankfully, it has, and Kathryn Stockett absolutely deserves her success. She's written a wonderful book.

The Help takes place in Jackson, Mississippi, during the birth of the civil rights movement. Jackson is a repressed, insular place, riddled with invisible social lines between black and white, employers and their help. Skeeter Phelan, an opinionated young woman fresh out of college, wants to change things. Aibileen, an elderly black maid, wants to finally tell all the stories she's gathered over a lifetime of serving white people. Together with a third maid named Minny, Skeeter and Aibileen join together to write a book, a book that will blow Jackson's secrets wide open.

Stockett tells her story from the perspective of all three main characters, each getting to tell her part. Minny and Aibileen's sections are written in dialect, a choice that was controversial for some reviewers. I personally found the narration to be convincingly written and in good taste. Stockett is nothing if not bold.

The novel's greatest strength lies in its three main characters. Many authors struggle to create just one memorable, iconic character; Stockett creates three.

Skeeter, the young white woman at the center of the story, is the de facto protagonist. I have a feeling Skeeter may join Huck Finn and Scout Finch in the annals of Southern literature. She emerges as an entirely lovable, well-rounded character. Stockett is not afraid to make hard for her, either. By the end of the novel, Skeeter has lost all of her friends, her boyfriend and most of the important relationships in her life, yet she remains optimistic for the future.

Although somewhat flatter than the other two (and less actively involved in the plot), I charge any reader not to love Aibileen. She is undoubtedly the soul of the book, the voice of wisdom and reason both to the reader and to the other characters.

But I think Minny is truly Stockett's biggest achievement. This woman should be unlikable: she's temperamental, brash, blunt and unforgiving, yet she emerges as the novel's antihero who slowly reveals herself as a kind, courageous person. Her relationship with her naive young employer is one of the book's finest subplots, alternately funny and touching.

It is this mixture of humor (often dark humor) and poignancy that Stockett has perfected. Her style is smooth, eminently readable and fully-formed. There's no evidence that this is her first novel:

Mother pulls the pad of paper from under the covers, tucked in the invisible pocket she's had sewn in every garment, where she keeps antivomiting pills, tissues. Tiny dictatorial lists. Even though she is so weak, I'm surprised by the steadiness of her hand as she writes on the "Do Not Wear" list: "Gray, shapeless, mannishly tailored pants." She smiles, satisfied.

It sounds macabre, but when Mother realized that after she's dead, she won't be able to tell me what to wear anymore, she came up with this ingenious postmortem system. She's assuming I'll never go buy new, unsatisfactory clothes on my own. She's probably right. ---(page 374)

Few writers could tackle a subject like the civil rights movement of the '60s with the grace and fairness that Stockett does. She does an excellent job of portraying the culture in all its complexity, letting us see everyone's perspective. She masterfully shows that the racism of the period was deeply ingrained in everyone-- black and white. She also restrains herself from getting overly syrupy when it comes to the barriers broken down by Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. The novel doesn't end with all the residents of Jackson accepting each other.

I have a few small problems with the book. Stockett does have a tendency towards spelling things out, particularly thematic elements. A little subtlety might have been nice. There's also one notably poor characterization in a book full of excellent ones: Hilly Holbrook, Skeeter's nasty best friend and the book's antagonist, who is too irredeemably, cartoonishly evil. These are small issues, though, that rarely detract from the novel.

Overall, The Help is a fabulous novel, a well-paced, emotional human drama set against a time of historic cultural change. This is one to set on the shelf next to The Secret Life of Bees (2002) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). I wouldn't be surprised if Kathryn Stockett ends up as this generation's Harper Lee.

NEXT UP: Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex, by Eoin Colfer. Yeah, I know it's a kid's book. I can't read a kid's book every now and then?

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Atonement by Ian McEwan, 2001

Some books break your heart. Some books are so beautiful and so perfectly crafted that you find yourself getting truly involved in their stories-- even though you know it will only end in tragedy.

Atonement is gorgeous and brilliant and savagely cruel to readers' emotions. It's one of the finest novels I've ever read. The prose is simply superior, but (more importantly, in my opinion), so is the story.

The novel opens a few years before World War II. Briony Tallis is a young girl in an idyllic, innocent England. A precocious budding author, Briony looks for the story in everything. This tendency leads to disaster when she observes an encounter between her older sister Cecilia and the housekeeper's son and gravely misreads the participant's motives, setting the stage for a catastrophic lie that will destroy the lives of three people.

McEwan is a revelation. One moment, he is poetically exploring the recesses of a character's mind, the next he is relating a pulse-pounding scene of wartime destruction. He can do dialogue, description, even action scenes like a grand master.

Take this excerpt:

A second thought always followed the first, one mystery bred another: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had. This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely. For though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers. She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't really feel it. (pages 45-46)

I mean, wow. How the hell did Ian McEwan get inside my head?

The novel starts with a lengthy segment exploring the situation at the Tallis's house in 1935, through several viewpoints, all impeccably, believably written. After Robbie is arrested for rape, the novel leaps to his experiences in France during World War II.

The section following Robbie as he tries to join the evacuation at Dunkirk is the best piece of war narrative I've read since Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels(1974). It's a pitch-perfect combination of tragic and thrilling.

Atonement's other big section is the relation of Briony's experiences as a nurse in pre-Blitz London. Again, McEwan shines. The episode is horrific and sickening, and startlingly beautiful.

If I have a criticism for the first four-fifths of the novel, it's that the three parts feel a tad disjointed, almost as though they're not quite part of the same narrative. This is no mistake, however.

In the closing pages (which take place in London, 1999), we find out that the previous 440 pages were all written by Briony, seeking atonement for her crime through the godlike power of writing.

By this point, I was caught in the novel's web, involved with the characters, and truly hoping for a happy ending.

Naturally, there really isn't one. Star-crossed lovers Robbie and Cecilia were both killed in the war and never reunited. Briony lived out her life in misery, never finding redemption for her one, devastating lie.

There could be no other ending. It would not be consistent for there to be an uplifting ending. The novel is dark, and though there is still hope at the end, it is basically about the inability to change the past and the fact that every single action has a consequence.

But what I really respect McEwan for is his marriage of technical brilliance and fabulous storytelling. Many "literary" authors are so busy reveling in their cutting-edge prose that they forget that they need a gripping story. McEwan has the best of both worlds and the result is a truly spectacular piece of fiction.

NEXT UP: A classic Agatha Christie Poirot mystery, The Hollow.

Out of the Deep I Cry by Julia Spencer-Fleming

Out of the Deep I Cry by Julia Spencer-Fleming, 2004

Julia Spencer-Fleming's Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne mystery series is currently six volumes long. I've read the first two books (2002's In the Bleak Midwinter and 2003's A Fountain Filled With Blood) and found them to be witty, tightly plotted whodunits with excellent action scenes and a compelling will-they-won't-they relationships between the central characters.

The third installment, Out of the Deep I Cry, elevates the series from a well-written series of mysteries to serious literature. Spencer-Fleming proves herself to be a really gifted writer with the novel's harrowing passages of passion and pain.

Clare Fergusson, reverend of an Episcopalian church in a small town in upstate New York, and Russ Van Alstyne the town's police chief, are the series' main characters. Even though Russ is married, the two are powerfully attracted to each other. Spencer-Fleming's subtle, sensitive portrayal of their relationship is a beautifully controlled feat of writing.

When a member of Clare's vestry draws on an old trust fund to repair the church's roof, Clare and Russ are drawn into the disappearance of a local doctor--a disappearance that eerily mirrors a similar one in 1930.

The mystery is unusual and far more intricate than your usual "body in the library" puzzle. The various suspects and possible motives are sharply drawn and clues are slipped in with the skill of a practiced author.

Flashbacks tell the complex story of the tragic Ketchem family, particularly the tormented matriarch Jane. The flashbacks are largely superb--historically accurate, emotionally moving and beautifully mirrored in the main story.

It's not many authors who can believably weave flashbacks from 1926 or 1950 into the narrative of a present-day novel, but the flashbacks work wonderfully, although a couple feel a tad long, as though they've been lengthened to pad the novel. Damn fine padding, though.

Spencer-Fleming's writing is sharp and crisp, her dialogue believable. Though she is not an author that lapses too often into poeticism,some of her passages have a luminous beauty:

And that ended his day's adventure. At least until that night, when he woke up his mother, yelling, from the first nightmare he could remember since he was ten. And in later years, even after he had walked, awake, through nightmares of men blown to a pulp and helicopters falling out of the sky, he still sometimes remembered the sensation of sinking into the cool dark water. The pale, withered face. The black, black eyes. And he would shiver. ---- (page 12)

Each book so far has featured a memorable action set piece at the novel's end. The first book had a thrilling cat-and-mouse game between Clare and a killer in the middle of a snowbound forest. The second book featured a helicopter crash. This book tops both of them with a terrific scene in which Clare and Russ are trapped in a flooding basement. After 350 pages of buildup, Spencer-Fleming is smart enough to know that readers want an action-packed climax.

The solution to the novel's central mystery is twisty and satisfying. Spencer-Fleming takes special care to make it emotionally satisfying, rather than just a simple shock ending.

And the wonderful twining of the novel's mystery plot and the relationship between Russ and Clare is ultimately the book's highlight. It's a balancing act that most writers struggle with, but Spencer-Fleming manages it with apparent ease.

With three future volumes in print and a fourth coming out in spring '11, there's plenty more to come from the series, which, with this installment, really makes the leap to greatness.

NEXT UP: I'll be reviewing Olympos, the second part of Dan Simmons's insanely strange and original Ilium/Olympos duology.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer

The Host by Stephenie Meyer, 2008

There are a lot of things that Stephenie Meyer does not do well. Her characters are thin. Her plots are shallow and entirely without momentum. She rarely exhibits much real writing talent.

She is, however, a fine storyteller who can make you care about characters that are not realistic, or situations that bear no resemblance to actual life. Her massively successful Twilight series is a lot of fun and The Host, too, is an extremely entertaining read despite its glaring faults.

The story takes place in a future when Earth has been taken over by parasitic "souls' who have made the planet into a peaceful, human-free paradise. A very few rogue humans remain in hiding.

A soul named Wanderer is implanted in a human named Melanie Stryder. Unlike most human hosts, Melanie refuses to leave her mind. Instead, she manipulates Wanderer into setting off in search of the man she loves and the colony of free humans he lives with.

The premise is reasonably creative; the execution is pedestrian. Meyer never goes into too much detail about the souls or the other alien worlds in the universe; like in her Twilight books, the supernatural is not really what the story is about.

What the story is is a passable, entertaining romance with a central love quadrangle involving four people and three bodies. Since Wanderer (called Wanda by the humans) shares Melanie's memories, she lusts unreservedly after Jared, while a hunky human named Ian gets a crush on Wanda herself.

Frankly, the romantic segments of the novel feel like Twilight with a fresh coat of paint. There's not a dime's worth of difference between Wanda and Bella, and Jared and Ian bear more than a passing resemblance to Jacob and Edward.

Like Bella, Wanda spends an inordinate amount of time cowering, being selfless, or nursing injuries incurred by the bigger and stronger, as well as being carried, cuddled or kissed by either Ian or Jared. There's nothing really wrong with it (it goes with Meyer's genre of female fantasy), but it is sometimes annoying that Wanda doesn't rely on herself a little more.

Once Wanda/Melanie reach the human colony, the plot mostly peters out. True to form, Meyer can't really handle villains or plot twists, so things mostly move along slowly and without a very clear sense of direction.

That's not to say that Wanda's slow acceptance into the colony isn't interesting or fairly well written. It's actually pretty intriguing and there are some clever touches; I especially like how easy it is for the humans to steal supplies from the mild-mannered alien parasites.

Meyer has some moments of clear-eyed, if on-the-nose prose. Take this passage, about two-thirds of the way through the novel:

What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge? This love was tricky; it had no hard-and-fast rules-- it might be given for free, as with Jamie, or earned through time and hard work, as with Ian, or completely and heartbreakingly unattainable, as with Jared.

Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?

I didn't know why I yearned after it so desperately. All I knew was that, now that I had it, it was worth every ounce of risk and agony it had cost. It was better than I'd imagined.

It was everything. (page 472)

It ain't Shakespeare, but it gets the point across well, and it's an interesting perspective. Most of Meyer's prose is workmanlike and uninspired. Some of her dialogue is okay, although anyone rough or violent generally ends up sounding like a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Another of Meyer's characteristics as a writer is her inability to kill or make permanently miserable any of her main characters. The novel's end is a classic example: everyone ends up with more or less exactly what they want.

Sometimes that's okay. The Host is pretty much the definition of feel-good, escapist literature. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, honestly. I like Wanda and Melanie and Jeb and Ian and Jared and even lunk-headed but ultimately redeemable Kyle. The novel doesn't say anything especially new or creative. It's about a hundred and fifty pages too long. It isn't even very well written. But it's an entertaining escape to a world where everybody finds a soul mate and, even though many millions of humans are effectively dead, everybody we care about ends up okay.

NEXT UP: I'll be reading Out of the Deep I Cry, a mystery novel from Julia Spencer-Fleming, a relatively little-known author who writes excellent mysteries. New review coming soon!

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

The Tempest by William Shakespeare, 1610-1611

I have to preface this review with a confession. I am not qualified to judge Shakespeare on his language, style or choice of words. I'm a very casual reader of the Bard and I simply don't have the authority to critique Shakespeare on more scholarly grounds.

What I read Shakespeare for (other than looking smart in public, of course) are the stories. It's easy to forget, what with all the thee-ing and thou-ing and archaic language, that Shakespeare was first and foremost a fantastic storyteller.

Just last year, I read and loved Richard III (1591), which was a wonderfully subtle character portrait and a fast-paced narrative of politics and betrayal. I really enjoyed the play as a story.

The Tempest really didn't impress me, from the perspective of storytelling. It was too simply plotted, too much like a fable. Unlike Shakespeare's witty comedies and penetrating dramas, The Tempest is far more interested in pageantry and spectacle than character.

Obviously, the man can write just about any human being on the planet into a corner. His speeches and dialogues are still crisp and clean today, even if the language has me going for the footnotes.

I know it's an old favorite, but take Prospero's speech from Act IV, Scene 1:

Prospero: Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. ----- (Signet edition, pages 103-104)

I mean, it's clear to everyone that William Shakespeare is a beautiful writer. That one speech works on three different levels. From an in-universe perspective, Prospero is explaining the end of a revel of spirits at his command. It is also a commentary on the nature of theater, and if you dig a little bit deeper, life itself, too.

But my problem with The Tempest is that it didn't engage me emotionally. The play itself is kind of an odd duck. It's not a comedy or a drama, but a kind of broad melodrama. The characters and their situation are painted with such broad strokes that it's impossible to get too involved.

The plot: Prospero, a wizard and the ousted Duke of Milan, lives on a deserted island with his virginal daughter Miranda. Prospero employs a host of supernatural beings as servants. When a ship bearing the new Duke of Milan and assorted other bigwigs passes by, he raises a tempest and crashes them on the island, where he can exact revenge at his leisure.

There are three main groups of characters: Prospero, Miranda, Ariel (a spirit) and Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, who all mostly stay near or around Prospero's house. Alonso (King of Naples), Antonio (the new Duke of Milan, and Prospero's brother) and a few other political types, just wander around the jungle, while Caliban (a misshapen monster and one of Prospero's servants) joins forces with a jester and a drunken butler from the ship to conspire against Prospero.

There's a lot going on, and not enough time to really develop the characters. Miranda, for instance, has only a handful of lines even though she plays a key role. Likewise, Antonio, who is the most obvious main villain, is not at all fleshed out and doesn't even do anything overly villainous.

And since Prospero's pulling the strings throughout the entire play, there's little suspense as to how it'll all turn out. He's an all-powerful magician that never faces any kind of real threat from anyone, which makes the play's dramatic tension nonexistent.

Take the subplot of Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano bumbling around drunkenly, plotting Prospero's death. The fact that the three least-important characters in the play are wandering around under the impression that they're running the show is an obvious source of comedy, but the play doesn't really need a comic-relief subplot that goes nowhere. They present no threat to the main characters and they are quickly dispatched at the end of the play with no real payoff.

Or take the fact that the conflict between Prospero and Antonio is never addressed at all. Antonio plays no significant role in the play's action and gets no comeuppance during the climax, which makes the overall plot of the play feel a little sloppy.

I know that criticizing Shakespeare on his storytelling is tough. He's an absolute master, and reading The Tempest from a literary perspective is rather awe-inspiring. But story-wise the play has more in common with fairy tales or parables than with the more emotionally mature work of Shakespeare's earlier period. Perhaps as he got older the Bard just didn't put as much effort into his plots.

But despite my problems with the play's story and structure, it's still Shakespeare. It's still amazing and funny and poignant and lyrical. There's such beauty and depth in the language. It never ceases to astonish me how readable and relevant Shakespeare's plays still are.

NEXT TIME: I'm still reading The Host and I should be done by the end of the week. I'll post my thoughts as soon as I'm done.