A gripping escape

I finished Kathryn Stockett's debut novel The Help at 4:30 this morning, refusing to spend another night not knowing how the plot would conclude. I will say that I loved quite a few things about it:

• Getting to glimpse 1960s Mississippi from the perspective of three women (two black maids, one white woman) Every few chapters, the narration switches between the women. While the chapter that changes from one woman to the next is named after the woman speaking, the label was really just a gesture because Stockett did an excellent job of distinguishing the three voices.
• Seeing life in those times (shockingly recent) from an under-reported perspective: the non-white view. To quote one of the main characters in the book: "Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it." 
• Digging into the complex relationships and social conditioning resulting from the absurd idea of segregation.
• Gaining Stockett's insights to human nature, relationships and life that are surfaced periodically in the thoughts and words of one of the three women. She manages to include them without making the narrative feel contrived -- something few authors who wax philosophical do well, in my view.

My critical opinion of the book is shaped by the following three factors:

• Experience: Given that Stockett drew on aspects of her own life as the foundation of this book, she is able to create a much more compelling situation and cast of characters than someone like myself who never lived in the Deep South during that period or who never even had a maid at home. That being said, the novel was still written by a white author putting herself creatively in two black women's shoes. I have to wonder how someone who had been in that situation would assess the characters and the reality conjured by the book. 
• Doubt: Stockett does an excellent job of incorporating real-life figures such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and real-life events such as the Birmingham church bombing, Kennedy's assassination, and the march on D.C. as a means of situating the reader within a familiar context. She also uses some of the characteristic violence of organizations like the KKK to reinforce the high-stakes gamble the characters brave in embarking on their communal project. That being said, I was (relieved but) skeptical when I finished the book that we the readers hadn't seen more of that behavior shatter our characters' worlds.
• Oomph: Finally, I felt the book had progressed at such a steady clip, unfolding with such gripping conflict and suspense, that the ending, while logical, underwhelmed me. I had glimpsed Stockett's genius laid bare on the pages leading up to it, I wondered if she couldn't have left the reader with a more dynamic finish.

Overall, though, I found myself fading from my own world's parameters and inhabiting Miss Skeeter's, Aibileen's and Minny's realities with an increasing eagerness as I worked through the book's 464 pages. Having walked with the women through their struggles and triumphs, I closed the book's cover with a renewed faith in humanity's capacity for nobility and absurdity, and a profound love for three women I had had the honor of getting to know in the previous pages.