It has been 17 years since the publication of “The Help,” by UA graduate Stockett. That novel, a huge bestseller, set in Mississippi, was a kind of expose of the treatment of domestic African American help in the ’60s. This new blockbuster opened high on the bestseller list. There was a readership waiting. It is a darned good thing “The Calamity Club” is a page-turner because there are 632 pages to turn. The story moves and I was IN, first to last.
It opens in September of 1933 in Oxford, Mississippi when Birdie Calhoun goes into the pharmacy to buy Merry Widow prophylactics for the prevention of disease, one hundred of them. The startled lady clerk says “That is an unusual amount.” And the novel is off and running. The reader, of course, also wants to know why she needs 100 of them.
Birdie is visiting her younger sister Frances who is married to a presumably well-off man, Rory Tartt, and lives with him and his mother at Idlewild, their family mansion. Birdie is there to borrow money. She, her mom and Meemaw are about to lose the family home in Footely, in the Delta. Times are really hard for everyone. The Percy mansion, down the road, has been foreclosed on and is deserted. A local physician is named Dr. Welty Pittmann. Stockett has fun with her Mississippi setting.
When Birdie is not narrating, that chore is taken by Meg, an 11-year-old stuck in the local orphanage. Meg is being tormented there, harshly and inexplicably, by Mrs. Garnett Pittman. She is kept alone in a hot, airless, moldy room and often whipped. Why does Garnett Pittman hate her so? Meg’s story, as she describes her horrendous conditions, would make a reader weep, but she’s a wisecracker, with the wit and cleverness to tell it with irony. Imagine if Oliver Twist’s story were told by a sassy Lee Smith teenage narrator. Birdie volunteers as bookkeeper at the orphanage and so meets Meg.
In the course of the novel we learn a lot that is wrong with Mississippi besides the obvious poverty and racism. The state is corrupt from top to bottom. Power is maldistributed so helpless people can be not only incarcerated, but declared feebleminded, committed to mental institutions, even sterilized. Women especially are being treated badly.
What everyone has in common is destitution or the very realistic fear of it. Due to Rory’s financial stupidity and arrogance, the Tartts are in financial trouble too, and might lose their grand mansion. There are no jobs. What to do? Birdie, Frances, and Meg’s mother, Charlie, who reappears, hire some “help” and open, on the back lawn, a dime-a-dance club, catering to the arriving Ole Miss boys. The dance hall, and its adjunct businesses are a huge success, which takes us back to the opening scene.
