Book Review - "The Invention of Wings"

Book Review - “The Invention of Wings” – by: Sue Monk Kidd - 373 pages – Viking - Reviewed by: Jeb Ladouceur

Before sitting down with this year’s equivalent of The Help, I did something I wish I’d done before reading that politically correct, if potty-mouthed, Kathryn Stockett phenomenon a few years back—I asked a dozen acquaintances (liberals, conservatives, men and women young and old) a question that I considered fairly straightforward: “Do you approve of slavery?”

It seemed unnecessary to sound out my Black associates on the issue.

I explained that I’d just read my fourth bestselling novel on the subject in as many years: The Invention of Wings, by the immensely talented Sue Monk Kidd, and was preparing a review.

“Approve of slavery? Of course not,” came the universal reply. “What kind of question is that?” And one associate added, “Why would you even suggest approving such a thing?”

The simple fact is, of course, that I had made no suggestion at all. I merely wanted to establish what seemed obvious to me—that an inordinate number of books are still being written as apologies for an intrinsically evil, mostly economically driven institution that no longer exists … and whose proponents would be roundly castigated if it did.

With all due respect, in Kidd’s sweeping narrative about a White girl and her Black slave counterpart, it seems the Georgia author considers it unworthy of inclusion in her 1800’s literary prognostication that general condemnation of slavery might actually come to pass. (Incidentally, the term ‘counterpart,’ suggesting a degree of equality, would have gotten both youngsters severely punished if uttered in ante-bellum South Carolina).

That said, one can nonetheless picture legions of fans succumbing huffily to Kidd’s overkill as they are psychologically forced to weep for ‘Handful’ the slave, while being inwardly corralled into berating her owner whenever possible. Oh, the opportunities to fashion the 11-year-old Mistress Sarah into a truly courageous champion are there, alright, but one gets the impression from the outset that such would amount to the stealing of ‘Handful’s’ thunder—a prospect anathema to Kidd, and not to be permitted in her overstuffed bag of tricks.

This literary lopsidedness is a device that Ms. Kidd stresses unrelentingly in The Invention of Wings. It begins with a slave-whipping that Sarah Grimke (a true-life historical figure, by the way) has witnessed as a child. To her credit, the author uses the traumatic incident as the cause of the incipient abolitionist’s stuttering, though Kidd fails to develop what could have been a much to be pitied, full-blown disorder. It was an opportunity sadly squandered, since speech pathologists assure us that the impact of stammering (a more apt term for Sarah’s problem) on one’s emotional state can be severe.

But when it comes to creating sympathetic characters, we know where Sue Monk Kidd’s inclinations are focused. Her crusade, like Sarah’s, is clearly defined, rigid, and it brooks no diminution. She flat-out refuses to budge from the mold of Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau … even in 21^st Century America.

This is all well and good, and to suggest that Kidd, Stockett, Northrup (12 Years a Slave) et al do otherwise would be not only politically incorrect, but artistically unfair. Thus, as writers and readers, we find ourselves in a quandary, where old wounds can hardly be expected to heal if well-intentioned authors—especially those whose book sales number in the millions of copies annually—insist on scraping the nation’s sores during a drumbeat cacophony that constantly rings loudest along the port side corridors of history.

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Award-winning Smithtown writer Jeb Ladouceur is the author of eight novels, and his book and theater reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. In Ladouceur’s next thriller, “Harvest” due in late summer, an American doctor is forced to perform illegal surgeries for a gang of vital organ traffickers in The Balkans.