The Help chronicles the endeavours of three women, one white and two black, to record the experiences of black women working as maids in white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the civil rights movement of the early 1960s.

I will begin this review with some controversies that need to be addressed. I didn’t fall in love with this book, but now that I’ve finally read it, I take issue with some of the criticisms made. The most obvious one to begin with lies in the premise of the book itself: that this is the story of a ‘white saviour’ who rescues the black characters from racism. In reality, I see Skeeter’s role as much more utilitarian: in this setting, the project of the book could not have been realised without the agency of a white person to enable it and provide stewardship of the project, so her role had to exist for the plot to make sense. I get the impression that this, like a lot of the criticisms made, is either based on quite a surface-level reading of the book, or is based on the film, which is obviously a more simplified and commercialised version of the story.

Then there is the criticism that a white author should not write from the perspective of a black person: on one level, I understand the concerns here over appropriation or whitewashing of the realities of black lives, but writers extending their reach outside of their own scope of experience is inevitable, unless they only write autobiography. If the portrayal of the black experience has problems in this case then it behoves readers to point them out, but it is not inherently wrong to write outside of one’s own voice. If anything, this argument would suggest that the film should be better than the book, since the roles are portrayed by black actors who can draw from their own experiences in their performance, but in my view the book is significantly more nuanced and subtle, while the film tends to simplify and stereotype in its condensation of the story. A fairer criticism would be that Skeeter’s role as the vehicle through which these black women tell their stories is positive and good, but Stockett has not done the same thing: she could have interviewed black women who’d worked as maids, but chose to write a fictional account of her own devising instead.

On the other hand, I somewhat agree that there’s a perspective issue in the sense that there’s a lot of assumed optimism in the black woman’s relationship with her employers, without any solid basis. The complexity of relationships and the love that can grow between black ‘help’ and white families is obviously at the centre of this story, but I wonder how Stockett (or any other white person) could know for absolute certainty that more was at stake here than a professional relationship in the eyes of the black woman. Showing affection to the children is also part of the job of a surrogate mother figure. There could have been a deeper analysis of how much of the maids’ behaviour was the exercise of a work persona or within a work capacity. There is perhaps also an interesting angle of whether the maids in the novel are presented as acting in ‘bad faith’ in the existentialist sense, viewing the job as a major part of their personal identity, but I realise a piece of popular fiction is perhaps not the best place for that sort of discussion, and who knows if it has any truth in how real-life black maids in the 60’s viewed their role.

On the topic of ‘voices’, one criticism I’ve seen made is that the black maids write in dialect but the white characters’ speech is in conventional English, but it wouldn’t make sense for white characters to be speaking in African-American Vernacular English. I took the description of Celia’s speech to mean that she has a strong accent but doesn’t use non-standard English in her phrasing. I also took it that we’re getting these characters’ POVs directly, i.e. they’re not actually writing their stories but we’re ‘seeing’ from their perspectives, so the way the white characters’ dialogue is written is how they were literally speaking in the moment, not how the POV character would have said it or written it down themselves. There is definitely a sharp divide in the way characters purportedly in the same community speak, but I’m not in a position to say how realistic this portrayal is, so I will end with saying that it didn’t hinder my own immersion.

When it comes to this subject matter, unfortunately I think a lot of people look for an entirely hate-driven and pessimistic portrayal of race relations and a very (excusing the pun) ‘black and white’ view of social divisions and morality. This would not be a realistic view of the civil rights movement, since obviously there were white allies who opposed segregation, which is why I don’t view Skeeter’s role as unrealistic. Furthermore, I appreciated that she is not portrayed as some saintly figure for her allyship, or in general: she has her own history of casual prejudice, albeit from a more politically liberal perspective (Aibileen recalls her saying that black people “go to church too much”) and is primarily acting out of self-interest, confronting a hot-button issue not out of righteousness but to further her writing career. Perhaps the whole black church declaring that she’s ‘like family to them’ was a stretch, but she does at least have some smaller level of experience being treated as an ‘other’ because of her physical appearance and political views, as Celia, the other sympathetic white woman, does because she’s ‘white trash’ — although white, she’s from a poor, rural background, and is discriminated against because of class differences. There are also moments of debatable morality from the black characters, namely

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Yule May stealing Hilly’s ‘ruby’ when refused a loan for her sons’ college fund; Minny feeding Hilly her own shit; the woman who snaps at Skeeter during the interviews, purporting to speak for the whole group of black women when in fact she is at odds with them; and Constantine’s daughter spitting in Skeeter’s mother’s face when she is asked to leave the house

. Obviously all these have to be placed in the context of lashing out against a deeply racist society, but they are still not straightforwardly morally ‘clean’ acts, which helps humanise and individualise the black characters as well.

For better or worse, Skeeter’s POV is also a lot more trivial in focus than those of Aibileen and Minny, which helps to illustrate the racial divide. Probably my least favourite aspect of the book was Skeeter’s romantic subplot: I understand it’s exploring an important aspect of women’s roles in conservative communities, and one that is very variably experienced (based on class, attractiveness, and education level), but it felt very trivial compared to the appalling racism, hate crimes etc. that characterised the other two POVs. Overall, Skeeter is a sympathetic character with relatable problems, but a lot of her problems naturally seem insignificant compared to what the black maids go through, which I must assume is intentional. The only exception is

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her mother’s cancer, which adds a much more challenging layer to the portrayal of Skeeter’s relationship with her mother, but doesn’t seem to have any connection to the main plot

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Although the characters and their morality in general are nuanced and complex, I did not think much of the villain. Hilly is very ‘flat’, the least well-rendered character in the book: she’s an appropriate antagonist, given that the whole novel is focused on themes of race and women’s relationships, but her motivations are never actually explained. There’s a connection made between her weaponisation of racial biases and her husband’s run for state senate, but the root cause of her racism would presumably be something much deeper. Her former friendship with Skeeter is never explained: I suppose they are equals, both being rich, but it’s hard to see beyond this what they would have in common. However, I liked that her character was not treated as comic relief as she regularly was in the film, since it made more sense for me for her character to remain sinister and believable as a major community influence. On the other hand, in both the book and the film, I didn’t really understand why

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the pie incident was blamed on her: surely she was the victim if it was done unknowingly? If we interpret that other characters are pleased that she got her comeuppance, then her level of influence in the community doesn’t make sense, since this suggests most people in Jackson are secretly opposed to her (and I thought this was an issue with the film; she can’t simultaneously be despised and in full control of the community). The portrayal of this incident was one of the weaker aspects of the book

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The ending was

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underwhelming. I thought Skeeter might decide that Mississippi is a worthy home for a writer after all, but I understand that she wanted to put her career first and it makes it clear that her relationship with Scott is over and that she’s establishing her independence. It also follows the author’s life path, and the book is clearly in part autobiographical. Conversely, I did like that, unlike the film’s climax, the book’s popularity wasn’t framed as some seismic shift in the culture: realistically, a conservative Southern town is not going to change their entire social structure based on one book, and progress tends to manifest in small and gradual changes (of which perhaps the book could have been one), but perhaps we could have ended on an unrelated high note like the Civil Rights Act to parallel the positive changes we see for Skeeter as she’s exposed to more progressive politics. Instead, we got two bittersweet endings for Aibileen and Minny, which I suppose reflects that their struggles are not over, but I would have liked a better sense of Minny’s long-term prospects for her family, in particular whether she was successful in escaping her abusive husband

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Finally, I will say that the audiobook is great and really enlivens the story. Usually I’m not a fan of regional dialects in writing, but I thought it worked well here, and is even better when spoken aloud. Octavia Spencer delivers another excellent performance as Minny, a character originally based on her, and the other performances emphasise the distinctness of the setting while keeping their delivery vivid and realistic.