I owe both Bill Bryson and Kathryn Stockett a reassessment. After getting a poor impression of each author from reading their earlier work, I have more recently encountered them as skilled storytellers and historians. First, Bill Bryson. In The Lost Continent, a report of his observations after he drove all over the United States, he was a man hunting for reasons to sneer. He came across as a jerk who fancied himself clever for making snide remarks about small-town America. (Consider the answer he gave to a server who asked if he’d like a doggy bag: “I don’t believe I could find a dog that would eat it.” Not civil, not called for, not clever.) I found his bulletins from brief stops in small towns to be presumptuously dismissive (Gatlinburg, Tennessee) or abruptly abandoned if he couldn’t find any dirt (Chapel Hill, North Carolina). Smirking at Gatlinburg is too easy; he’s judging the place by its tacky physical appearance and doesn’t explore the warmth of the people who live there. The best he could do in the appealing Chapel Hill was to mock pretentious conversations overheard in a coffee shop, so he drove away.
However, recently my book club read Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927, which might as well have been written by an entirely different person. In this book Bryson is scholarly without being pretentious, accessible without trying to ingratiate himself to his reader, likeable, and gratifyingly informative. I learned so much on every page—often in every paragraph—that I finished the book astounded by Bryson’s accomplishment. He takes the year 1927 as his point of departure to show us all that transpired in the summer of that one year, the background of what led to those events, and the ramifications. Charles Lindberg and Babe Ruth headline a huge cast of politicians, criminals, businessmen, entertainers, celebrities, and eccentrics whose lives intersected in 1927.
Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help, was a gigantic bestseller that inspired a movie that was much better than the book. My problem with The Help in its original novel form is that it is so self-congratulatory and tone deaf. In some chapters Stockett presumes to write from the point of view of a Black domestic servant, and she uses excruciating dialect in a tasteless attempt to render an African-American voice. The White protagonist writes a column for the local newspaper in which she offers tips for effective housework; the problem is that she knows nothing about her supposed area of expertise and gets assistance from the aforementioned Black domestic servant. (I have to wonder whether Stockett intended for her title to contain multiple meanings.) In the end she decamps for New York City to write for a magazine and bequeaths her newspaper column to the woman who has been doing her ghost writing all along—and who will now be earning $10 a week for her labors. The entire novel smacks of a writer who considers herself much more open-minded than the White bigots in her book (a low bar to clear) but who is unaware of how condescending she is being to her African-American characters.
Stockett’s new novel, The Calamity Club, marks a major step forward for her artistically. I would not have read it had my book club chosen another title for us to discuss, but once I got into it, I was impressed. First of all, Stockett has done gobs of research. She sets the book in 1930’s Mississippi, where the depression is hitting families hard. In this environment she gets to conjure up a good old-fashioned melodrama, wherein the bad people are really horrible and the good people are heroically endearing. Her two narrators are Birdie Calhoun, a spunky 24-year-old with a good mind for numbers and a wry sense of humor, and Meg LeFleur, a precocious 11-year-old living at the outset in an orphanage, where, true to her Dickensian heritage, she is badly abused. When Birdie’s and Meg’s stories intersect, we have two loveable heroines to cheer. Needless to say, Stockett presents both women with insurmountable problems that they manage to surmount by the time we readers reach the highly satisfying ending.