Description
A novel that takes forced sterilization as its material has to decide, early, whether it means to leave you angry or leave you comforted. These are not the same book. The historical novel carries a standing temptation toward the rescue — to find, inside a documented horror, the one person who gets out, and to let that single exit stand in for everyone who did not. Kathryn Stockett’s first novel in seventeen years is a long, skilled, often very funny instance of that temptation, and a clear case study in what it costs.
The year is 1933, the place Oxford, Mississippi, the Depression grinding everyone down a notch. Two narrators alternate. Birdie Calhoun — twenty-four, plain, quick-tongued, sent from a failing family farm to ask a married sister for money — instead ends up, through a chain of small and plausible disasters, running a brothel out of a borrowed mansion. And Meg, eleven, an orphan whose mother has vanished, kept by the orphanage’s chairlady in a windowless office like a held breath. The two threads lean toward each other until they touch: the chairlady’s favorite hatred, a “feebleminded woman” she rails about in the hallways, turns out to be Meg’s mother.
The book’s real achievement is Meg. Stockett builds her a voice that is funny the way frightened children are funny — wit as the only armor on hand — and then routes the century’s ugliest science straight through it. Meg’s tormentor, the chairlady Garnett, governs by one repeated sentence: “It starts with the mother and spreads to the child, unless somebody does something to stop it.” A child hears that as ordinary adult noise. The reader hears the whole apparatus of Mississippi’s 1928 sterilization statute folded into a hallway aside. (I read these orphanage chapters across two airless afternoons, which felt, unfairly, like the right conditions for them.) That sidelong delivery — horror in a register the narrator cannot yet decode — is the novel at full strength.
Meg’s other education is in being left. An older, harder orphan named Ava drills a sentence into her until she will say it back: “Mama left me on purpose, mamas do not come back.” The book then spends hundreds of pages proving it true. Every mother who appears at the orphanage door gives up her child; Meg, who misses nothing, has watched one after another do it and not one come back.
It is the hardest thing the novel knows — and the last page reverses it. The mother returns: blue dress, good car, the apology Meg had scripted for herself years before. I’ll admit the scene caught me; it is built with care. But the book has just staged the defeat of its own intelligence. The skepticism it earned across four hundred pages, it spends in a paragraph. And the reversal is the smaller problem. The larger one is that nothing has actually been beaten. Garnett is checkmated by a single well-aimed threat of exposure; the orphanage, the statute, the men who sign the sterilization orders — all of it survives the novel intact. What Stockett delivers is not a reckoning but an extraction. One girl is lifted clear, and the machine keeps running behind her.
Stockett seems to half-know this. The Author’s Note turns abruptly emphatic — the real 1928 law, the seventy thousand Americans sterilized and possibly far more, a line drawn straight to the present fight over women’s healthcare. She writes that it is her “duty to imagine what it feels like to stand in another person’s shoes.” The note is doing work the novel declined to do. A story that resolves in rescue cannot bear the weight that note wants to set on it; consolation and indictment pull opposite ways, and consolation takes the round.
A second strain runs through the brothel. Those chapters are the comic engine — the absurdly genteel “dance club” front, college boys too shy to misbehave, an endless argument over what to name the place. The timing is sure, the pages move. But the novel’s subject is the violent policing of women’s sexuality, and its comic centerpiece is a whorehouse rendered as warm, scrubbed, a found family with good coffee. Once — when an aging woman explains she was put to the work at twelve, and that there is no life on the other side of it — the real cost shows through, and it is the truest page in that whole strand. Then the caper resumes. The book wants sex work as trauma when it needs pathos and as lark when it needs charm, and never reconciles the two.
The question that trailed The Help, seventeen years ago, has not been answered here so much as rearranged. The Black women of this book cook and wash and carry, drawn with evident affection and held to the margins of a story that turns on them. The one who cuts deepest — a light-skinned woman turned away by white and Black houses alike — arrives as a late reveal whose function is mostly to show how little the white narrator has understood. The reveal is sharp. The arrangement around it is the old one.
What stays, after the plot has clicked its last latch shut, is not the reunion. It is what the book leaves un-rescued. Tom, a gentle and failed man, still singing as he goes under in the middle of a lake, his pockets weighted full of stones. Five splintery boards nailed across the office window, spoiling a child’s only view on purpose. The novel is at its best when it lets that kind of loneliness stand, and weakest in its hurry to reach in and fix it. Meg, in the end, understood the stakes better than the plot that lifts her out: before anyone came for her, she wrote her own name inside a dead man’s book, having already decided, on her own, that the worst loneliness there is must be knowing the people you love will soon forget you were ever there.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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