Cambridge Book Club Book Review e Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett — Reviewed by Denise Copeland
S arah Kathryn Stockett waited seventeen years to publish a second novel, which places a rather unforgiving burden on The Calamity Club before its characters have even entered the room. Fortunately, Stockett returns to Mississippi with the qualities that made The Help so readable: an ear for South- ern speech, a sharp eye for social hypocrisy and an abiding interest in women whom respectable society has badly underestimated. The story opens in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, when the Depression has stripped away any po- lite fiction that security is distributed according to merit. Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has spent two years at the Lafayette County Orphan Asy- lum after her mother left her there on Christ- mas Eve. Classified among the older girls whom prospective parents are unlikely to choose, Meg protects herself with intelligence, suspicion and a refusal to believe she has been permanently abandoned. She is funny without becoming pre- cocious for the convenience of the reader, and her determination gives the sprawling novel its strongest pulse. Birdie Calhoun arrives in Oxford carrying a different variety of desperation. Unmarried, outspoken and skilled with numbers, she hopes her socially successful sister Frances will help the family Birdie has been supporting. Frances has acquired a wealthy husband and a careful- ly arranged life, but the household proves far less secure than its polished exterior suggests. Birdie’s bookkeeping eventually brings her into the affairs of the orphanage and into Meg’s or- bit, where ledgers reveal that institutions can conceal cruelty as efficiently as families conceal debt. Charlie, a resourceful woman with few re- maining options, completes the novel’s central
alliance. Her proposed solution to their prob- lems is audacious, morally complicated and en- tertaining enough that readers may find them- selves supporting conduct they would firmly condemn at a neighborhood association meet- ing. Stockett allows the women to be generous, exasperating, frightened and opportunistic, sometimes within the same conversation. Their friendship is not sentimental decoration; it is the practical arrangement that makes survival possible when every official system has failed them. Beneath the adventure lies a disturbing account of how poor and unconventional women were judged by authorities empowered to decide who was fit to become a mother. Stockett incorpo- rates the era’s eugenics movement and forced sterilization policies without turning the novel into a history lecture. The facts are horrifying The ledgers reveal that institutions can conceal cruelty just as efficiently as families conceal debt, desperation and shame. — Kathryn Stockett
40A VOL. 652 YA
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