Characters Not Like Me

Copy of my mother's well-loved book

It’s wonderful that more and more books are being written by American authors across a wide range of racial and ethnic, ability and gender identities, books in which children who don’t fit the 1950s “Dick and Jane and Sally” mode can recognize themselves, maybe for the first time. I also hope, however, that children who do fit the “Dick and Jane and Sally” mode will explore and enjoy books with characters who come from backgrounds different from their own, because that’s what made the world richer and more complex for me when I was growing up.

 

My mother loved Anne of Green Gables. Anne was an orphan; I was not. Anne was Canadian; I was not. Anne's lifetime came well before mine in history. Anne was red-haired, outgoing, and had an impulsive temper, whereas I was a quiet, brown-haired, painfully shy child, but reading a book that featured a main character so different from myself gave me insights into what it might be like to be a another kind of person, someone whose responses to situations were very unlike my own. 

 

The book Janitor’s Girl, by Frieda Friedman, introduced me to urban apartment living and a family of immigrants in New York City, a neighborhood and characters and living situation nothing like my own suburban life. Again, I lived that urban immigrant life vicariously while reading the book. How dull my childhood would have been if I had read only books with characters whose lives were like mine!

 

The Black Stallion, by Walter Farley, was a favorite book of mine for many years, and there weren’t any girls in it at all. (Funny that girls will read books with a boy as the main character, but boys shy away from books in which the main character is a girl.) A boy and a horse, shipwrecked on an uninhabited island? How would they survive? In my imagination, I lived that story over and over as if it were my own life.

 

I was 12 years old, about Anne’s age, when I read the much more serious The Diary of Anne Frank, and the effect on my heart and mind was profound. A Jewish girl, forced into hiding with her family, their circumstances horribly and unimaginably constrained during the Nazi Occupation of Holland. But there – reading it, I did imagine and was horrified and wanted so much for that little girl to survive and be my friend! These days some people don’t want young people Anne’s age to read her story, and that breaks my heart all over again for her. She wanted to be a writer. She was a writer, young as she was, and although she died, she left her diary for us, the story of a real girl with hopes and dreams and feelings and ambitions. Everyone should read her diary!

 

Mildred Taylor is not all that much older than I am, so she had not yet written her books when I was a schoolgirl, but discovering them in adulthood has opened new worlds to me. The first Taylor novel I read was The Land – again, a book I wish every American would read. Click here for a review that will give you reasons. 

 

My mother loved the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter, but only in recent years did I finally read Freckles, astonished to learn that the main character had only one arm! Yet the author hardly dwelled on what the young man lacked: the emphasis was on what he had and could do. Although this author was as popular in her day as J. K. Rowling is in ours, her stories are very different from today’s popular literature for young people. They are unabashedly “wholesome” and sentimental. Still, the freedom and beauty of the natural outdoor settings remains.

 

My friend the author Ellen Airgood has written two books for young people, Prairie Evers and The Education of Ivy Blake. Ivy appears as Prairie’s friend in the first book and takes center stage in the second. Ivy’s mother probably should never have had a child, but we don’t choose our parents, and it is Airgood’s gift to show us Ivy finding her way without ever sugar-coating or sentimentalizing her discoveries or stooping to unbelievable miracles. 

 

Well-written stories of difficult lives and challenging life situations help stretch our imaginations and expand our circle of empathy. They let us travel outside and beyond the limits of our own skins. This is a good thing! 

 

Today – Saturday, October 29^th -- is the last day of my Dog Ears Books 2022 season, but I will keep in touch via this blog throughout my winter seasonal retirement, and my bookstore will re-open in the spring of 2023 for its 30^th anniversary year! Can you believe it? It’s amazing to me.

 

Were there books you read as a young person that opened your eyes to lives very different from your own? What were they? What are you reading now, and what do you look forward to reading over the winter? 

Last day of 2022 season is today!

Talkin' Dirt Today

My curiosity regarding the new novel American Dirt, already piqued, got another boost, given discussion on NPR this morning. As the Chicago Tribune noted, 

Cummins is not being criticized because she is a non-Mexican person writing about the Mexican experience. She is being criticized because she is a non-Mexican person writing about the Mexican experience poorly. 

What I suspect -- and can only suspect, not having received an ARC and so not having yet read the novel -- is that the author, Jeanine Cummins, wrote the best novel she could but wasn’t the original and brilliant writer that demanding, discriminating readers were hoping for. If this is the case, I have to feel a little sorry for the author, awarded a huge monetary advance, yes, but now publicly castigated for being a poor writer. I’m sure she would have equalled Shakespeare had it been within her power. 

Often (how often I couldn’t say) it is the marketing division that drives a decisions to publish at all, as well as how big a budget a given book will get: the higher the expected profit figures, the more generous the advance. One speaker on the radio called American Dirt something like (I don’t recall exactly and have to paraphrase) an exciting and entertaining potboiler, which is my clue to expect something like The Help or Gone With the Wind -- that is, a novel expected to be a huge popular bestseller though probably unlikely to be a literary prize-winner or future classic. Again, if I’m right about this, it’s no surprise that a publisher would fork over a huge advance. And Oprah loved the book! (So did Stephen King.) Remember, Oprah also loved The Help and even chose to bring it to the screen. And I love Oprah — don’t get me wrong! I would say, though, that her reading instincts often line up with easily accessible stories, which is to say memoirs and fiction within the reach of the popular imagination -- though sometimes, it’s true, she convinces average Americans to stretch their imaginations. 

At any rate, as controversy rages over American Dirt, there are the usual “two sides” arrayed against each other in the popular media, one group crying out against cultural appropriation, the other objecting (just as loudly) to censorship and political correctness. There are also those who critique the book on its literary merits. What I anticipate with greatest curiosity, however, is a widening public conversation, with as many different voices as they are in the American reading public, the kind of public conversation that grew out of discussion of The Help  (see here and here) and was, to me, much more interesting than the novel that sparked the conversation. Because we do need to hear from many more previously silenced voices in the American public forum.

Who Are We?

I don't know how many of you watched and/or listened to the State of the Union address or what you thought of it or if you stayed on board for the Democratic response and what you thought of that, but these are my thoughts:

“This is who we are.”

“This is not who we are.”

Both are right, and both wrong. We are and we are not what we appear to be. 

We the people are not of one mind, and we are not of a single character. We are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We are Dr. Frankenstein, his monster, and the people of the village, and the little girl who was killed. 

We the people are, though politicians and spokespersons too often forget it, the Native Americans who were here before the Europeans came, as well as those from Europe seeking religious freedom. Thus we are murderers and victims as well as dreamers. We the people came as slaves from Africa, brought slaves, bought and sold and worked slaves. We are all these things.

We are not only parents of children killed by immigrants but also immigrants or children of immigrants ourselves, and among native-born Americans there are murderers, too. We the people are children, parents, killers, and victims, and as police and members of the military, we display the same wide range of character and behavior found in American citizens at large.

We the people are law-abiding citizens, prisoners both guilty and innocent, and free individuals guilty of crimes for which we have so far escaped paying the price. We are those who go the extra mile and take on the burdens and problems of others and those who freeload and game the system. We are all of these.

We contradict each other and ourselves. Our dreams are incompatible, whether across the nation, within communities, or in our own hearts. We work to achieve them, or we demand that others do the work, or we hope for magic to transform our world. We hope and despair, are angry and complacent, take heart, lie down and cry, trudge on, give up. We do it all. 

"This," today, is who we are, and this is not who are are. But whatever we are, we can be more. We can be something else. We can be better. 

Are We Homogenized Yet?

Does every place look like any other place?

People often think of the United States as one big, commercial, undifferentiated whole, and it’s certainly true that one finds many of the same chain motels, chain restaurants, big box stores, etc. almost anywhere from coast to coast. Yet how much variety exists alongside and amongst and in the large spaces between this sprawling sameness!

Land

Pancake-flat prairie gives way to rolling prairie that in turn gives way to taller and taller wooded, rolling hills overlaying limestone ledges and underground caverns that go on until they flatten out again in plains and eventually (we are not there yet today), rise up as mountains. The earth itself changes color as one moves through the landscape, and so do the rocks and even the soil. 

And through the land run the rivers and creeks, and in it lie innumerable lakes and ponds. In Missouri and eastern Oklahoma, it seems that every river of any size has been dammed, such that the map shows huge, meandering impoundment lakes, surely the joy of recreational fishermen, but the smaller bodies of water constantly tug at me as we pass them. 

Traveling with no more detailed map than a U.S. road atlas, I find myself constantly frustrated by not knowing the names of little creeks and minor rivers we cross. It seems wrong to take so little note of them, glancing ignorantly and never learning their names. But then, the little ponds and rivulets probably have no names at all.

Fauna

Most of the animals we have seen in the past two days have been cattle, because serious Western cattle country begins in western Missouri and continues into and across Oklahoma. I love seeing them, cattle of all colors, here a group of calves, there a couple heavy bulls fenced separate from the rest, frequent herds scattered across enormous open pasture land.

We took a little break from the toll road to explore a two-lane road for 30 miles or so, however, and there I was rewarded by five horses out in a pasture and, by the side of the road, an armadillo! The Artist said the detour would really be worthwhile if only he could spot a Rolls Royce, but the odds were against him there. Armadillo 1: Rolls Royce 0.

For some reason, I keep noticing hawks on this trip west. Today — again, without really looking for them — I managed to spot six. The first one was perched in a tree. The second and third were perched on one branch, side to side but looking in opposite directions, so that between them they would not miss anything. Hawk #4 was on the ground, in the grass, standing there as if waiting for a bus; #5 perched in a nut tree (in the first nut grove we saw), and #6 was, sadly, roadkill.

Flora

Missouri is thick with sycamores. It’s thick with trees in general, endlessly rolling, wooded hills except where cleared by the hand of man. So many outstandingly beautiful trees appeared during the course of the day’s drive, and yet how many will I remember? Most have already vanished from memory. There was one sycamore, though, its branches as white as sun-bleached bones, and at another spot along the road a lightning-killed pine stood blackened, broken stubs branches still reaching for the sky. 

Only when we stopped for gas at the start of that little detour did I finally have a chance to make a single tree portrait. Farther down that two-lane road I spotted the trip’s first soap tree yucca (another one appeared later in the day in Elk City), but you’ll have to take my word for it.

People

For much of this Monday, January 29, we were on the Will Rogers Turnpike, but other people were here before Will Rogers, and as our road continued west, signs along the way reminded us that we were entering the Cherokee Nation, Sac Nation, Fox Nation, Cheyenne-Arapaho Nation. Also, when we paused to take a break, we found ourselves among people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds and skin tones. Americans and visitors, everyone takes to the road!

The toll road we were on for most of today runs parallel to old Route 66. Pieces of the old road remain, as do remnants of former lives along it.

My On-and-Off Teaching Career, Part II

Although I found my feet, so to speak, in teaching my own classes as a graduate student (see Part I of these reminiscences, only if interested), my first junior college experience as an adjunct instructor meant starting all over again. Gone was the support group of other graduate students. Gone also was the comfortable familiarity of an office and phone shared with four other graduate students: as an adjunct I was a stranger in a strange land, with not so much as a coat hook to call my own! From the parking lot to the classroom, with a stop in the department office to pick up messages and mail and to make any copies I might need for class, then back to the parking lot, carrying my “office” with me, I went, feeling—at first--almost invisible and hardly part of the world around me.

I won’t say that the first class I taught as an adjunct was a disaster, but it wasn’t good. Brought in at the last minute, I inherited textbook and syllabus from the faculty member originally been assigned that section, so the whole structure of the class was someone else’s, not mine, and I let the materials dictate the content of each session. Not good. That initial error continued through the semester as students and I force-marched through consecutive chapters of an introductory textbook, all of us uninspired and the students overwhelmed by too much material in too little time.

Things improved markedly in subsequent semesters. Still “homeless” in terms of an office, I did get to choose my own textbooks from then on, and that change improved every aspect of my classes. I don’t recall when I had the idea of starting Intro to Ethics with the Golden Rule rather than with Plato, but that helped, too. My reasoning was that the Golden Rule should be familiar to my students, common background cultural knowledge, and so we would be starting from home ground, as one does when setting out on any travels to new territory. The first day launched the class almost immediately into discussion, which was good; when asked to write one-sentence formulations of the G.R., however, half the students unintentionally threw me a curve ball. Although they’d heard of the G.R. all their lives, many of them understood it as conditional, as in one student’s “Be nice to someone if they’re nice to you.” I was glad I’d asked the question so the confusion could be addressed and (for most of them--sigh!) banished!

Survey classes in philosophy tend to be narrowly Western in scope, and starting Intro to Ethics with the Golden Rule, in addition to launching us from somewhat familiar ground, also let me bring in Confucius and Hillel. There was a wide range of ages among my community college students, but their backgrounds were otherwise fairly homogeneous, so the Golden Rule was, for me, a wedge to let in (I hoped) a bit more the world. 

Students from age 17 (high school seniors taking college classes) to late middle age initially responded to practical questions of ethics, as most of us do, with whatever beliefs they brought with them to class. My task was not to change their minds but to encourage them to explore more deeply both their own convictions and other points of view. When questions of crime and punishment came under discussion, for instance, my students automatically imagined themselves and/or their children (present or future) as victims of crime, never as perpetrators. Every murderer also has parents, but their considerations of punishment never addressed that unhappy reality. There I needed a different wedge, and one that served other purposes, as well.

High school teachers and college instructors across the country worry about cheating and plagiarism. There’s one concern. Another concern in teaching theories of ethics is making them more than theories to memorize. And finally, coming back to the homogeneity of background among my students, there is the question of taking perspectives other than that of one’s own life. One way I addressed all three concerns came at the end of the class. The final was an essay, written in the classroom on exam day, and it was permissible, even encouraged, that the students use their books and all class notes. There were two or three topics from which they were to choose one and write for the entire period. Here is one of my all-time favorite essay exam topics: “You are a parent whose child has been accused of murder. You have the choice of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke as your child’s lawyer. Which one do you choose, and why?”

Different semesters brought different pleasures and challenges. Dedicated, knowledge-hungry students stood out from those merely needing credits. On the other hand, one semester there were two young men—not, fortunately, in the same section—who were both convinced, despite their lack of background, inability to listen to points of view of other students, and, in the case of one, a dismaying failure of logic, in the other, a disinclination to turn in assignments--that they, not I, should be leading the class. That was a difficult semester. Looking back over the years, I see that what we graduate students first observed when teaching two sections of the same class remained true always: every class has its own personality, its own conglomerate identity, unlike any other. The material and assignments may be the same, the building, and even the classroom, but the individuals who make up the class will assure that each class is itself a unique individual. Quite fascinating! And at the end of a rough semester, reassuring.

One year I was asked to teach in the summer session. (I cannot resist here a parenthetical note: sessions are named, here in northern Michigan, "Spring," "Early Summer," "Summer," and "Fall." "Spring" begins in January and runs until May. Someone's PR idea? Pretending winter doesn't exist Up North?) Summer sessions at our community college run for eight weeks rather than the sixteen weeks of the usual semester, and so my morning section ran from something like 9 a.m. to noon. That may not be the exact hours—my point is that it was a long class period, longer than any class I’d ever taught, and before our first meeting I wondered how we would ever fill that much time productively and keep everyone awake. Turned out there was no problem. Turned out one of the most enjoyable classes I ever taught. In some ways, it was the peak experience of my on-and-off teaching career.

The class was Contemporary Ethical Dilemmas, a required class for students in nursing, law enforcement, and business. In this course it was even more important that the readings and classroom experience provide practical tools with which to address dilemmas students would face later in life and in their careers. Learning to listen to others with views different from their own was one such tool. Investigating their own views on specific topics in depth was another. There was also, almost always, a need to gather more information on a topic.

The long class period proved a real boon. In a 50-minute class, too often discussion on a topic is just warming up when the bell rings. Not a problem in a 3-hour class. Isn’t three hours an awfully long time to sit in one room, though? We didn’t just sit. In three hours there is plenty of time to shift gears, to move from mini-lecture to class discussion to small group work, and there is also time to take a 10-minute break and move out into the hallways, visit the restroom, get a cup of coffee, and chat. Of the 16 class meetings we had that summer, only twice were the students ready to leave at the end of the time period. Fourteen times they wanted to stay longer! The capstone of the course, after two teams did extensive research, was a debate, at the end of which a guest came to visit the class, someone who had experience with the topic they had debated. It was reality, not just theory—life, not just a class. And we all enjoyed ourselves immensely.

A lull followed in my teaching life, as I was very busy with my bookstore and doing as much as possible to bootstrap that little operation to higher levels. Then one year a regular faculty member died unexpectedly, and I was called in again to teach a couple sections of one of his (Dilemmas) class. Imagine my surprise this time around to be assigned an office of my own! Nominally, it was a shared office, but the other instructor was only there twice, as she taught her classes online. An office! A door and a key! A window! A desk and a computer and a telephone and a couple of bookshelves! It was Spartan in appearance but luxury to me! I could post office hours on my own door and see students in my own office rather than in the snack bar. My classroom was in the same (new) building as my office.

The office was a happy, welcome change. Other changes were a bit nerve-wracking. All communications from administration to faculty now came by e-mail, as did most communications from students, and everyone seemed to expect that instructors would be sitting at computers receiving e-mails seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Students wanted to e-mail in their assignments. They wanted personal and near-immediate responses from the instructor as to what they had missed when absent. (Hint to students: Never ask, implying a possibility that nothing worthwhile or important occurred in an entire class period, “Did I miss anything?” The train kept moving without you on it.) I’ve read that instructors who teach online rather than in a classroom spend much more time on the various aspects of their teaching, and I can well believe it. It goes along with e-mail and now texting and other forms of communication: the more instantaneous sending messages becomes, the greater the expectation that replies will also be instantaneous, that everyone is "on call" at all times.

But my teaching was in a classroom, and it was good to be there again. The classroom part of teaching is the best. Meeting with students, reading their papers, talking with them about their work—that’s good, too. I also enjoyed preparing for class—thinking through my plan for each session and how to connect meaningful assignments to lectures and assigned reading. Grading? No one likes grading. No one. (Agree or disagree?)

I know people who teach online classes and have been asked if I would ever want to do that. No, it isn’t me, and quite honestly I don’t see how it can be philosophy, either. Formal logic, sure. Mathematics, no problem. But so much of philosophy is argument—and by that I don’t mean people shouting at each other but learning to listen and hear each other and addressing each other’s questions and concerns and finding ways to express their own in such a way that they will be heard and understood. It requires practice, and it requires courage. Ethics in particular applies to how human beings live together, at work and in community. Meeting face to face brings all that to life.

Last September on vacation in the U.P., going to Marquette to visit a friend, we drove through the campus of Northern Michigan University, and I realized for the first time that I have moved into a new phase of life. It used to be that visiting a campus would start me thinking about being a student there and what that might be like. Later, for a few years, I saw each campus through the eyes of a prospective graduate student. In more recent years I’d look around and wonder how it would be to teach there. Now I don’t imagine myself at all on a new campus. It isn’t my world any more. I'm only passing through.

I had my college and university experience--as a student, a graduate student, a graduate assistant, and as an instructor. There were some bad patches along the way, but overall they were good years. I learned a lot about the world and about myself and am glad I had that time. But I don’t see more teaching philosophy in my future. It’s someone else’s turn now. --Is it yours?

THE HELP Discussion (and Disagreement) Continues

I’ve decided to begin a new post to continue discussion on discussion (yes, that’s what I mean) of The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. I did go back and add into my last post a link (here it is again) to a review of the book, not only for the review itself but, much more, for the very lengthy train of comments that follows the review, comments left by American and British readers, native-born and immigrant Americans, black and white readers, women (mostly), men (a significant number), Northerners and Southerners both, and that’s where I want to begin today. Reading these comments held me enthralled for hours on Thursday morning, and I recommend the experience, especially if you are ever tempted to think that any one group of people, however that group is defined, will respond en bloc to any book written. If you visit the site and have the time and patience to read through all the comments (which I cannot recommend strongly enough), eventually you’ll come to a point where commentators are coming back to respond to comments made in response to their earlier comments, and that’s where the conversation becomes more difficult but, I believe, all the more worth pursuing for that reason. One of the black women who became a major voice in the conversation has her own website.

Whatever you thought of the book (if you read it), in my opinion the cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-generational, etc. conversation is much more riveting. We do need to talk to each other, to people who have had different experiences from ours, to people whose opinions do not agree with ours. Only if we can stay in the conversation, even when tempers flare, voices rise and tears start up--we can’t control others and can’t always control ourselves--is there hope for our country and for our world. I believe that.

So now, having opened up the can of worms with the question in my previous post (Can this white author portray the experience of black women?), I’ll stick my neck out and put my opinion of the book on the line, first making clear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying writers of fiction can only succeed in offering the experience of their own lives, i.e., that fiction should be given up and only autobiography written and published. Neither am I saying that a writer has no “right” to imagine a character of the opposite gender, of a different race or ethnicity or religion or sexual orientation or what-have-you. But just as freedom of expression exists for writers, it exists for readers, too. Not only reviewers and critics and academics but every ordinary reader, too, has a right to evaluate the success of a work of fiction according to her or his standards, however personal those standards may be.

Now, backtracking:

I approached the book with trepidation. I was wary. My defenses were up. I wondered (this is a point several people made in comments and reviews) why the black characters’ dialogue was spelled out in dialect but not that of the white characters, and all I could think was that maybe a white Southerner like the author doesn’t hear herself as speaking with an accent. A minor point, but it kept my defenses up, so that I questioned other authorial decisions all the way along, and by the time I reached the end of the book I still wasn’t sure what to think about it. I had entered into the story to a degree but not completely. The fate of the characters concerned me, but at the same time there were plot devices I could not fully buy. My resistance, not overcome by the novel itself, was not overcome by the library discussion group, either. Am I just stubborn, or what?

Then I found the California Literary Review site and realized I was not alone and that opinions about this book range all over the map! Reading those comments helped. They also took me into a much larger world of literary and social discussion, and I was moved and enlightened and encouraged by the willingness of readers to share their opinions and to disagree.

So here’s where my thoughts have taken me so far (for convenience and clarity I’ll number the few points I want to make):

1. In general, any writer attempting the point of view of a character with experience way outside the writer’s own has greatly multiplied the difficulties, already considerable, of producing believable fiction. No writer—in our country, at this time in history, at least—is barred from making the attempt. It does take chutzpah and invites more than the average amount of criticism. I have often heard it said of a male novelist, “His women characters aren’t real,” and certain novels by female writers are dismissed by men, either without comment or with a disparaging remark that “Men don’t talk like that.” It isn’t that men are not allowed to create female characters or that women aren’t permitted to create male characters, but that whenever we know the gender of the author we subject the characters of the opposite gender to closer scrutiny in the work. Hence the many female mystery writers who use initials rather than first names. (Fascinating studies have been done with subjects reading short pieces and not knowing the gender of the writers; when gender was revealed, most felt they should have been able to pick up clues to gender, even where they failed miserably. I don’t know if similar race-blind reading/writing studies have been done but would like to know of any out there.)

2. Anyone can say, or any work of fiction, “I don’t believe it.” Years ago I had an acting teacher who told our class that just as we didn’t have to be hens to recognize rotten eggs, anyone could criticize acting, simply by saying it didn’t ring true. The same holds for fiction. If you believe it, it succeeded for you; if not, it didn’t.

3. So what does it take for fiction to succeed, for characters to be believable to readers? As far as I’m concerned, the characters I’m reading about don’t have to be “like me” (how much would I learn if that were the case?), but I do need to feel that the writer has gotten inside the characters, so that I have at least the illusion that I am encountering a person rather than a type. Here the standard I keep coming back to over the years, because my first reading of this novel was such a watershed experience for me as a reader, is James Baldwin’s Another Country. I maintain that anyone coming to this book with no knowledge of the author’s identity would not be able to say with certainty that the writer was black or white, male or female, gay or straight, because Baldwin was able to inhabit all of his characters with sympathy. They were not simple characters, either. Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, working with the material of her own life, had a similar ability. You don’t necessarily fall in love with all of Baldwin’s or Smith’s characters, but because of the depth given them by their authors (and here the word ‘author’ takes on its great creative power!), you realize at least part of why they are the way they are, and you grow in understanding.

4. So, finally, I’ll allow that I was disappointed in Stockett’s novel. Characters were recognizable, yes, but for me the third and fourth dimensions were lacking. Why did Minnie put up with physical abuse from her husband? James Baldwin would have given us some insight. Why was Miss Leefolt so cold to her own little daughter? Betty Smith would have let us see a little way into the mother’s hard heart and how it had gotten that way. I can imagine Minnie understanding how demoralizing life is for a black man and knowing that only at home can he have any power, and I can imagine that Mae Mobley’s mother might be unhappy in her marriage or doesn’t have pride in anything she herself has ever done, but I have to do all this imagining on my own, because the author hasn’t done it for me. These are limitations in characterization, and most of the characters are similarly limited. Besides this flaw, along with the very believable general circumstances (historical fact, many of them), there were other plot contrivances that I found unbelievable and/or forced.

So that’s what I think of the book. I’m not arguing with anyone who enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed parts of it myself. It isn’t a book I would recommend, however, given all the other, much better novels that deserve to be read.

What I think of the discussions it has sparked is something else again. The discussions I’ve found online I find very exciting! I left my own comment, saying that this, all these different people from different backgrounds with different opinions—this is the movie (probably documentary) that I want to see, not a film version of the book. “But if there is so much deep discussion because of it, doesn’t that mean the book had to be pretty good?” Someone posed this question to me, and it’s a good question, but my answer is no, I don’t think the quality of discussion depends on the quality of the catalyst.

I can, however, be grateful to the catalyst. Kathryn Stockett had a lot of chutzpah to write the book she did. She is a successful story-teller, with a best-seller under her belt, and now she will have a lifetime to grow as a writer. Meanwhile, for now, the controversy continues.