When Frances and her mother-in-law return from shopping to find that Frances’ husband, Rory, has ransacked the house for everything of value and absconded to God knows where — the man has been keeping a lot of secrets — the shallow, clueless Frances seems most concerned with her public image. “If people ever find out about this, I swear I’ll shoot myself,” she threatens, a 1930s Alexis Rose blubbering around Schitt’s Creek. “Well, good luck,” pragmatic Birdie replies, quick as a bullet. “Rory took all the guns.”
One night at the Orphan, before Meg is adopted, she prays to God to “give me something better than five months alone in that room.” Then she repeats the same prayer a couple more times for good measure. “I figure if it is already in the till, it can’t hurt to say it again. Plus Mama always said men are slow learners, so you got to repeat it until it sticks.”
The men in this novel are indeed almost universally pathetic, comically impotent in more ways than one. They squander fortunes and abandon their mistresses and flunk out of Yale, they flock to brothels from the Ole Miss dormitories in busloads, they cower pitifully in the presence of their strong-willed wives. It is the women who are the novel’s driving force, for better and for worse. Recent fiction has seen few villains quite so hateable as Garnett Pittman.
Stockett’s portraits of good and evil, of rich and poor, of women with class and those who can’t afford it, can be uncomplicated to the point of cartoonish, but the point here isn’t so much moral complexity as it is pure, hell-raising entertainment.
It’s the least complicated thing in the world, after all, the yearning between mother and child. Some 400 pages after Birdie asks her about missing her mama, Meg finally answers, in a moment of desperation when she’s experienced one abandonment too many. “Maybe I will let myself say it,” she thinks. “I curl in a ball and say it soft as a poem. Just this once, so only I can hear it: I want my mommy.”
THE CALAMITY CLUB | By Kathryn Stockett | Spiegel & Grau | 638 pp. | $35
Source:
www.nytimes.com
