“The Calamity Club” by Kathryn Stockett is many things: it’s a riveting historical fiction, it’s a powerful narrative about struggles to survive during the Depression, it’s a shocking glimpse into the treatment of women during the 1930s, and it’s about the different ways women fight to survive in a world that’s filled with oppression, denigration and condescension.
To be honest, the novel is intimidating; it’s over 600 pages. But to my relief, once begun, the narration by Birdie and Meg, the woman and the eleven-year-old girl, who are at the center of the story, is beautifully done and we are quickly immersed in their lives and their travails. Stockett has differentiated each character’s style of narration so it’s easy to know which is relating their story. Additionally, in Meg’s chapters, the dialogue is shown in italics, instead of tradition quotation marks. It all works wonderfully well.
Meg’s narration reads like the thought process of an eleven-year-old girl whose mother was not always appropriate in what she shared with her young child. When Meg’s mother disappeared when she was nine, she almost starved in their secluded small home. Finally, a man showed up and said he was taking her somewhere where they would care for her. He took her to The Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for Girls, a place she would grow to despise.
The chairwoman of the orphanage is Garnett Pittman, and from the start Meg’s narrative clearly demonstrates how very much Garnett despises Meg. Meg loves classes, so Garnett takes Meg out of the classes the older girls attend and puts her in a tiny room every day. After time, the room fills with mold, and the one window is boarded up so there is no fresh air. It’s Mississippi, and in the summer the air in the room is stifling. Meg sits there day after day with nothing productive to do, no books to read, nothing to occupy her time. That’s torture for a bright young girl.
After a brief prologue, wherein we meet Birdie Calhoun as she buys a huge number of Merry Widows (condoms) from a local pharmacy, the story begins three months prior. We learn that Birdie leaves her home in Footely, Mississippi, to travel to Oxford and ask her sister for enough money to pay the back taxes so they can keep the family home. Birdie’s sister, Frances, is married to a wealthy man, but they’ve never met him. They were not invited to the wedding, and Frances refuses to respond to their letters and the rare phone call. So in addition to asking for help, the family wants to know that Frances is all right.
Birdie is the older of the two sisters, and the least pretty one. Frances was determined to marry well and convinced her parents to send her to finishing school near Memphis, and while there she met Rory Tartt, the man she married. They live with his mother in Oxford. Birdie, on the other hand, is her family’s sole support and works as a bookkeeper at Footely Farm & Mercantile. She is paid half of what the boy who sweeps the store is paid because she is a woman. That’s just the first of many serious injustices we read about.
Birdie describes the two sisters as follows: “She was two years younger than me and the petite, prissier, cry-her-way-out-of-the-crime sister, while I was the taller, plainer one, but funnier and therefore, least in my opinion, more interesting.” And we see that Birdie is also the more intelligent one, thinking about life and injustices and making up her own mind instead of just following the opinions of others. Birdie is kind, generous, and a warrior for justice. Birdie also, after a bad case of mumps, was told that she would never be able to have children. Because of that, it’s assumed that she will never get married, so her father teaches her to be self-sufficient. Birdie is able to change a flat tire, paint a room, and repair plumbing.
When she arrives in Oxford, she sees that Frances lives in a beautiful huge home. And while Frances doesn’t like her mother-in-law, when Birdie meets Mrs. Tartt, they get along just fine. But Frances has not told Mrs. Tartt the truth about her family’s circumstances, and she has intimated that they live on a plantation. Birdie’s father was a civil engineer, and he had a respectable job, but they were by no means rich. When he died unexpectedly, they were forced to live frugally. While they do get an annuity from his job, it is not enough to cover all their needs and pay the taxes on the home.
Astute readers will quickly understand that all is not as it appears to be with the Tartt family, including with Frances’s marriage. Mrs. Tartt asks her son about a painting he sent to the restorer that’s been there for months, and he gets noticeably nervous when she says she visited the bank he works at. Meanwhile, Frances is trying to fit in with the society ladies, so she volunteers at the orphanage. Birdie helps out when Frances tells her that they need someone to go over the books before the yearly audit. That’s when Birdie meets Meg.
We know from the start that things at the orphanage are not what they should be. When Birdie goes to shake hands with Meg, Garnett stops her and tells her they don’t touch the “big girls.” Meg is eleven and tiny for her age. Hardly a “big girl.” Frances has told Birdie about how Garnett started a work program for girls who aren’t adopted by the age of twelve. Meg’s best friend there, Ava, was sent to a cannery on the Gulf Coast to work when she had her 12th birthday. Garnett explains to Birdie that Meg isn’t attending classes; she’s a bad apple and has been expelled. But Birdie sees Meg’s intelligence and her pluck, and she admires Meg and feels protective of her.
Through Stockett’s narrative, we see how tragic the treatment of women was. Poor women. Frances repeats to Birdie the refrain that the mothers of the children in the orphanage are “feebleminded.” She tells her that “Most these unwed mothers are, they have no morals, they’ll lay with whites, coloreds, Indians, you name it.” The events in the novel are based on real history and in the Author’s Note, Stockett writes, “a law passed in 1928 that made it legal to sterilize any person in Mississippi deemed an imbecile.” Included in the criteria were not only those found “insane, idiots, imbeciles, or epileptics, but also the disabled, alcoholics, prostitutes, and sexually promiscuous women.” Feebleminded men, on the other hand, were those lacking in sex drive. Most of the people sterilized were women.
When Meg’s mother, Charlie, comes looking for her, Meg is gone. But Birdie promises to try to help Charlie find Meg. By this time, Birdie realizes that the Tartts aren’t going to be able to help pay for the back taxes, and in fact, that they are in dire straights themselves, and she is determined to do something. When Charlie has a plan, as unconventional and daring as it might be, Birdie is willing to try to right the injustices that have been perpetrated on those she cares for, who now include Charlie, Meg, and Mrs. Tartt, as well as Frances.
It’s 600 pages, but it doesn’t feel like it when you are reading about what is happening in Birdie and Meg’s lives. We can feel the Mississippi summer heat and commiserate with the lack of air conditioning. But more importantly, we are able to see life through the eyes of the women, women of different backgrounds, different circumstances, and different stages in life. There’s Mrs. Tartt, who was coddled her whole life and who relied on the men around her, first her husband and then her son, to take care of her. There’s Frances, who was determined to marry well so that her husband could take care of her. Birdie never expected to marry because of her inability to bear children, so she is self-sufficient but also horribly underpaid in comparison to men who don’t do work nearly as important as what she does. Charlie, Meg’s mother, has been persecuted and tortured by both men and one extremely vindictive woman. There are also the other women who become a part of Birdie and Charlie’s plan. Women who come from horrible backgrounds and who have suffered terribly. And, of course, there is Meg. Not yet a woman, but being horribly abused.
Do they all get happy endings? No, because that’s not how real life works. But Stockett creates an ending that is definitely satisfying and that wraps up the whole story beautifully. It’s a long book that quickly has us caring about the characters, and because the action is pretty much nonstop, we don’t want to stop reading. The writing is lovely, and Stockett’s use of metaphor is perfectly on point as when Birdie comments, “Already I was building levees to beat the flood of disappointment,” when she meets someone she finds attractive and then thinks it couldn’t possibly work out because he’s a banker in the middle of the Depression, and she is unable to bear children.
While I disagree with some reviewers who call the novel funny (although there is often some humor in Birdie’s narrative and sharp observations), I think the power of this novel lies in the beauty of the narration, the touching story, the display of the historic mistreatment of women, and the fact that in the novel, these women hold the power — even if it’s just for a while. This novel should make you angry. Angry at what was done to women who didn’t conform, and perhaps angry at what is being done to women now. So don’t let the heft of the novel keep you from reading it; you’ll race through it. I did. You’ll probably love it and think about it for weeks to come. I did.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.