Heros and Villains and Rats

I reeeeeeeally want to get to a point where I review one book at a time, but I'm so lazy and I keep getting distracted by things like naptime and lunchtime and second naptime. I'm bright-eyed and focused at the moment, and I actually read some great books last month so I'm going to straighten up and fly right and tell you about all of them, for what it's worth. But I'm only going to do a couple at a time because they're so long.

The Help
By Kathryn Stockett

I will admit right now that the main reason I did not read this book earlier is because the cover (you've seen it, the yellow and purple one with the little birds on it) is awful. I thought it was another Elizabeth Gilbert-style book about some middle-aged lady finding herself in a middle eastern country, and by "the help" she meant, "poetically" (read: ungrammatically) "self help."

Now, seeing the alternative cover to the left, I sort of understand why they changed it. Because people judge books by their covers (and are squeemish about being seen holding books with bad ones) not very many people would have bought this book. This cover more accurately describes what the book it about--black women raising white women's children in the fifties and sixties--but we've gotten to a point where even just the image of that is sort of offensive. The truth hurts.

The reader in me loved this book. I cried and cried. It's got lots of subplots and various lovable characters and more than anything it has a completely wicked villain.  The character of Hilly Holbrook is perfectly outrageous. With her "Home Health Sanitation Initiative," which is aimed at requiring all homes to have outdoor bathroom facilities for the African American "help," she gives the other characters--and the reader--somewhere to focus all of the rage and confusion brought on by living in a racist society.

The scholar in me is suspicious of how easy it is to pin the entire racist superstructure on Hilly's narrow, Southern shoulders. I don't want to give anything away for all of the dudes and the three white ladies left on earth who haven't read it, but although I loved the book, I often felt that it was too easy and too un(self)critical. The characters fall too easily and too comfortably into rolls we as "post-civil rights" (such a thing does not exist) Americans want them to fall into. They are "sassy" or "independent" or "old-fashioned." The characters challenged each other but they didn't challenge me. Which makes me wonder if I actually read the cover correctly: the story is a kind of lozenge or self-help for many of the middle-aged white ladies reading and sitting in the theaters, making them feel better about racism and women's relationships and now being so much better than then.

I don't mean that to sound critical of the demographic. Middle-aged white women seem to be the strongest reading demographic out there and more power to them. I'll be one sooner than I can imagine. I mean that an already good book could have done more to bust us out of our comfort zones and been really great.

I would recommend this book to: a lot of people, actually, despite my griping. But I think most of them have read it.

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
By Robert Sullivan

This is a very strange little book. It's part science, part field journal, part history. I'm mildly obsessed with science/history books that cover just one bizarre topic (See: Salt, Stiff, Spook, and New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People). In this book, one man chooses an alley in New York City and observes the rats every night for one year.  During that time he learns about the history of New York's rats, the relationship between rats and people, the history of that particular alley (which is much more interesting than you might imagine) and the past and present story of exterminators in New York. Sullivan has a poetic soul, so the book is filled with philosophy and literary quotations and he's also not abashed about what a strange person he is. He's obsessed and repulsed by rats in a way that is so completely opposite of my experience that I appreciate his candor.

Part of the book are really, really interesting.  This, unfortunately, is dragged down by the fact that parts of it are really, really boring. If you have a grotesque fascination with rats or a looking for this kind of armchair history/science book, I would recommend checking it out and reading the chapters that grab your fancy. The chapters on Plague, food and garbage are sort of mind boggling, particularly the chapter on plague in America. America! For anyone who dwells in a large city, it will certainly make you look at the streets and buildings around you with a different eye. 

I would recommend this book to: my Auntie Tanya because of her interest in critters, and all my friends who live in large cities.