I was sucker-punched by Kathryn Stockett's 'The Calamity Club'

“As a writer, and as a human being, I believe it’s my duty to imagine what it feels like to stand in another person’s shoes,” Kathryn Stockett writes in an author’s note in The Calamity Club, a No. 1 New York Times bestseller.

If you hear “a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation” in Stockett’s words, you’re not alone. That was what Kirkus Reviews scented in her blockbuster first novel, The Help, which sold a reported 15 million copies. And you’ll inhale more than a whiff of it in her second.

In a feel-good-about-feeling-bad novel, Stockett indicts the discredited practice of eugenics, or selective breeding, through the interlocking stories of two female characters in Mississippi in 1933: a 24-year-old unmarried bookkeeper, and an 11-year-sent to an orphanage because others saw her mother as “feebleminded.”

Could any modern reader not oppose an outdated idea supported by, as Stockett reminds us, Adolf Hitler? Or—more to the point—need to spend two days reading a bloated 656-page reminder of why such injustices were wrong, as I did? Especially if it meant paying $35 for the hardcover edition or spending months waiting for it?

Apparently, yes. My library 122 miles from the Mississippi border has 176 people on the waiting list for The Calamity Club. If everyone kept it for two weeks, I might wait a couple of years for it unless a copy turned up elsewhere in the Baldwin County library system before then. I sprang for the $16.99 Kindle edition and still finished the book thinking: That’s an entire weekend of my life I will never get back.

I’d bought The Calamity Club in part because The Help, for all its “white liberal self-congratulation,” showed worthy satirical impulses and had flashes of smart social commentary. One scene in the novel had a silent auction at a Junior League ball in Stockett’s native Jackson, Miss., where items like hand-tatted lace drew bids of several times more than they might sell for in stores: “Odd sterling servers are popular, for spooning out deviled eggs, removing pimientos from olives, cracking quail eggs.”

In my part of Alabama, where post-debs send their adolescents to Cotillion classes to pick up social graces, you may know women who own such things. They may well see themselves as needing quail-egg crackers: You can buy those eggs at our Piggly Wiggly supermarket. But a Slate review of The Calamity Club had a point:

“It seems fair to say that The Help would never gain the traction today that it got in 2009.”

When the movie version of The Help came out, a post by the Association of Black Women Historians listed defects its members found in the story, including “widespread stereotyping” of black characters, “misrepresentation” of black Southern speech, and “limiting racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.” Stockett’s portrayal of a maid named Aibileen Clark had led to a lawsuit by Ableen Cooper, who worked for her brother’s family. Cooper had sued for what she saw as the unauthorized use of her name and story, a lawsuit dismissed because the statute of limitations for the claim had expired.

But The Calamity Club arrived 17 years after The Help. Hadn’t Stockett had time to figure out how to avoid the accusations of unjust borrowing or stereotyping that her first novel sparked?