BOOK REVIEW: The Door, by Magda Szabo; or Good Help is Hard to Find

This book was highly praised by The New York Review of Books.  I didn't twinge at the narrative summary - a woman who becomes involved in the life of her housekeeper, but I should have.

Spoiler: My opinion is that of a privileged American woman with littler tolerance for muddled unreasonable individuals.

A narcissistic writer who becomes a literary success needs help managing her household because she doesn't have time to write.  Her husband is an oblivious paleolithic male who doesn't seem to think he needs to help her.  She doesn't think there's anything wrong with this picture.

She hires a highly recommended housekeeper but allows her to set her own hours, and choose her own tasks and menus.  Personal boundaries break down between the woman and her housekeeper and she quickly becomes an obnoxious tyrant.  The writer allows herself to be trampled by cruel judgments, harsh criticisms, and outrageous relations, I guess because she's spoiled by the high quality service and food (when she gets it), and feels guilty because of class distinctions.  

The writer discovers how tragic events damaged her good and faithful servant; the Holocaust and the Hungarian uprising make grievous wounds. Housekeeper has made her victimhood into self-tyranny and primitive obdurance, inflicted upon everyone else.

In the end, the housekeeper's own home is dirty and hoarded full of junk, and whatever valuable furniture she was going to receive from the housekeeper is found to be full of worms and worth nothing.
  
The keeper from this:  some people construct unassailable protected defense mechanisms that are so filled with anger they can't be saved.  Even protecting them from themselves is impossible.  So this is news?  To whom?