Go Set a Watchman (Reg PB)

The Enigma That Is Atticus Finch by Don Sugg “People generally see what they look for and hear what they listen for.” ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird Although not nearly as artfully crafted as her classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s 1957 first novel, Go Set a Watchman, contains flashes of why she is considered by many to be one of the premier twentieth century American novelists. This newly published novel had been rejected for publication until Lee re-wrote it from the perspective of Jean Louise, not as an adult, but as a child ranging in age between six and eight. To Kill a Mockingbird, subsequently went on to become one of the most widely read and deeply beloved American novels and films of all time, read and viewed by millions of students and adults alike. In Watchman’s first chapter, Lee immerses the reader in the same small, imaginary, and seemingly bucolic town of Maycomb, Alabama, in a manner that even the most ardent of Yankees will embrace. However, as one might suspect, there is something rotten in the town of Maycomb. Although Watchman focuses on the same characters we learned to love in Mockingbird, albeit twenty years later, the public reaction to it has been dramatically different. Despite there having been more pre-publication anticipation of Watchman than any novel since the Harry Potter series, there has been widespread indignation and gnashing of teeth by Mockingbird fans who, upon reading Watchman, discover that their sainted hero, Atticus Finch, turns out to be a far more complex, three-dimensional human being - one with warts, secrets, prejudices, and all. One couple, who had named their son Atticus, actually went so far as to have his name legally changed after they read Watchman. The great Canadian author, Robertson Davies, once wrote “You never read the same book twice”. This is certainly true of To Kill a Mockingbird. Taking the opportunity afforded by the publication of Watchman to revisit Mockingbird from an adult perspective and engaging in a careful, more critical reading, the reader may well come away with a very different view of Atticus Finch. Looking beyond the naïve perspective of his adoring daughter, Scout, and closely examining the more subtle facts of the story, we can see what a flawed man Atticus actually is - both as an attorney and as a father. Of his three criminal cases mentioned in the book, his first two ended with his clients being hanged. In the third, his client, Tom Robinson, is wrongly convicted of raping a white woman and subsequently commits suicide-by-cop. Even though Atticus knew full well that Tom could never receive a fair trial in racist Maycomb, he negligently fails to file a pre-trial motion for change of venue. Upon being asked why, he simply mumbles an inaudible response. On cross-examination, he never asks Mayella about sending her siblings away so that she could seduce Tom, nor does he call any of them as witnesses to corroberate Tom’s story. Despite complaining in his closing argument that the prosecution provided no medical evidence that a rape had been committed, Atticus himself fails to produce any medical testimony regarding Tom's disability. Instead he relies on a cheap and ultimately unconvincing courtroom stunt that could easily have been faked. Although it makes for a compelling visual image in both the book and the film, it simply doesn’t pass for good trial practice. Thus despite Atticus’s claims to the contrary, the only apparent issue available to poor Tom on appeal would seem to have been ineffective assistance of counsel. Atticus also proves himself to be an even worse father than attorney. Although the rest of the town attends the school pageant, Atticus selfishly and neglectfully refuses to escort Scout, electing instead to stay home and pay Jem to take her in his stead. He does this knowing that Bob Ewell who had threatened revenge on Atticus for his defense of Tom Robinson was openly accusing Atticus of getting him fired from his WPA job. Ewell had also recently attempted to break into Judge Taylor’s house and repeatedly harassed Tom Robinson’s widow, Helen. Had Atticus taken Scout to the pageant himself, Bob Ewell’s attack on Jem and Scout likely would never have occurred. Even after the attack, Atticus shows no remorse for his poor decision. Incredulously, Atticus, an experienced criminal defense attorney, actually encourages Sheriff Tate to bring a homicide charge against Jem for killing Bob Ewell. He does this despite the fact that Jem’s diminutive size and broken arm would have logically precluded him from having committed the stabbing. Why didn’t Atticus wait until Jem had regained consciousness and gotten his version of the events? When Boo Radley carried the injured and unconscious Jem home, why didn’t he even ask Boo Radley what had happened? How was Jem rendered unconscious after he had supposedly mortally wounded Ewell? Why was Atticus so willing, even anxious, to bring Jem to trial for the death of the very man whose testimony convinced the jury to find the innocent Tom Robinson guilty of rape? The obvious answer to these questions is that the seemingly wise and virtuous Atticus had such faith in the judicial system (despite the fact that it had convicted the innocent Tom Robinson), that he was convinced that a jury would see that Jem acted in self-defense and acquit him of any wrongdoing. But if we are to accept this as true, where was Atticus's faith in and devotion to the law only moments later when he was more than willing to be complicit in withholding material evidence that it was Boo Radley and not Jem who had in fact killed Bob Ewell? It begs credulity to think that Aticus might share Sheriff Tate’s concern with protecting Boo Radley from the ladies of Maycomb bringing him cake to the extent that he would be willing to jeopardize his own son’s life and liberty. Was he more apprehensive of the impact that the appearance of a cover-up of a crime allegedly committed by Jem would have on his own reputation and political career than he was for Jem’s wellbeing? The often overlooked beauty of Mockingbird is the fact that for the careful and thoughtful reader, these remain open questions. In Go Set a Watchman, Atticus is again shown to be a flawed hero. However, this time the moral imperfections of his daughter, Jean Louise (Scout in Mockingbird), are likewise brought to light. In the end, both characters' bigotry is exposed. But even more importantly, so is the bigotry of readers who fail to recognize that Lee is again challenging them to walk in another's shoes. But whereas it was relatively easy for the empathetic reader to walk in the shoes of Tom Robinson or Boo Radley, here Lee demands that readers take a more uncomfortable walk in the shoes of mid-twentieth century southerners, people who see their culture, values, and customs being decimated by the likes of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and an army of invading northern NAACP attorneys. Atticus recognizes full well both the need for and the inevitability of change. He simply objects to how the changes being rammed down their throats by what he sees as arrogant and equally bigoted northerners. Lee’s call for tolerance and acceptance in Watchman brings to mind President Abraham Lincoln’s then nearly century old admonition to a war-torn country at the end of his Second Inaugural Address: With malice toward none, and charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. (emphasis added) Of Mockingbird, Flannery O’Connor observed that “for a child's book it does all right. It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's book. Somebody ought to say what it is." But critic Stephen Metcalff was not only a little kinder, he was a little closer to the mark when he stated that “To Kill a Mockingbird is a type of literature Americans are most comfortable abiding, because it makes them most abidingly comfortable with themselves.” Go Set a Watchman provides no such comfort for its readers, which likely played a role in the book originally being rejected for publication. Rather, Watchman provides a rude awakening for those Mockingbird fans who share the younger Jean Louise’s blind adoration of Atticus. Here, when Jean Louise proves unable to walk in the shoes of Calpurnia, the black servant who had raised her as a child, she is then shocked and emotionally crushed by Calpurnia’s rejection of her offer to have Atticus defend her grandson and Calpurnia’s ability to only see “white folks” when she looks at Jean Louise. In a similar manner, Lee holds up a mirror to those readers who rather comfortably felt able to walk in the shoes of a Tom Robinson or Boo Radley by laying bare their inability to take a little stroll in the shoes of an aging, flawed, and yes, bigoted mid-twentieth century southern gentleman. I suspect that despite its relative lack of literary artistry, Ms. O’Connor would be far more pleased with Watchman than she was with Mockingbird. Just as the adult Jean Louise learns to look beyond her idealized childhood image of Atticus, Lee demands the same of her reader. Accordingly, it would be a mistake to simply dismiss Watchman as yet another bitter coming of age story with the adult child suddenly recognizing the previously idealized parent’s imperfections. Jean Louise comes to terms with her own frailties, imperfections and character deficiencies by way of learning to appreciate this more fully human Atticus Finch. By virtue of Atticus’s unconditional acceptance and even celebration of the development of his daughter’s independent mind - in spite of the bitterly scathing and venomous personal attack she levies at him - the Atticus of Watchman proves to be a far wiser, loving, and indeed more heroic father than Scout’s naïve childhood image of him that was shared by most Mockingbird readers. Clearly, Watchman is not a book about redemption. However, when it is read together with Mockingbird, the two books combine to provide a powerful insight into not just the necessity for but also the difficulty of attaining tolerance, acceptance, and ultimately reconciliation - on both individual and cultural levels. Unfortunately, after having their saintly image of Atticus Finch shattered, I fear that far too many teachers who have for years or even decades devotedly taught their students to emulate his seemingly uncompromising virtues will refuse to accept the fundamental truth of a flawed Atticus as revealed by a careful reading of Mockingbird in conjunction with a reading of Watchman. They will reject the opportunity to use Watchman to teach their students just how profoundly difficult wrestling with ideas and beliefs that conflict with their own can be. In doing so, they will deny their students a unique opportunity to develop their own more informed, open-minded, and tolerant worldview, one which is required to deal with a world populated by people who are far more complex than the cookie-cutter characters presented by Scout’s innocent and youthful perspective in Mockingbird. For such teachers, walking in the shoes of another applies only to those whose shoes already fit their own feet.

As a classic literature buff and To Kill a Mockingbird fan, I was eagerly anticipating this unique publication. After hearing some of the initial commentary, I was even more eager to determine for myself what my reaction to it would be. I heard people say that this would only damage Lee’s reputation. In my opinion, it does not, but rather enhances it. Lee’s insistence of not publishing anything after Mockingbird is well known. But as Watchman was written and offered for publication first, I’m glad that it saw the light of day, as the Watchman manuscript was in essence the “Mother,” of Mockingbird, out of which it was given life. An editor evaluating Watchman, saw something else of great potential in the manuscript, and I think the literary world is thankful for that editor for ultimately giving us Mockingbird. Perhaps those editors are worth their weight in gold. Had I been the editor, I likely would have accepted the Watchman manuscript, because it is excellent writing. Perhaps I would have seen a fleshing out of the story of Scout’s childhood as a sequel. But ultimately I think it is good that Mockingbird came first because chronologically it came first. Watchman as the sequel allows us to continue the story and see what happened to these beloved characters. If Watchman had come first, I think it might have lessened the impact of Mockingbird. Setting up the “Atticus as shining hero” is critical to Watchman because it’s what drives Scout/Jean Louise to act as she does. We, like Jean Louise, are shocked and dismayed that Atticus may not live up to his own ideal, because we’ve experienced it through Mockingbird first. But it is a natural experience which Jean Louise deals with. Childhood memories tend to be idealized and simplified in a child’s eye. But as we mature, we see that there is more to the world which we saw and that it is much more complicated. Yes, Mockingbird is a great book, but with the complexity and realism added, Watchman should stand as an excellent companion piece. It adds depth to the characters whom we thought we knew so well. It also expands the conversation about race beyond the more simplistic message that we should treat everyone equally before the law. And perhaps it is more amazing considering the time period and the perspective of a white, Southern woman of the day. Perhaps the editor saw that such a book and a message from such a person as Harper Lee would have been found too abrasive and in-your-face for the reading public of its day to handle. Mockingbird is more palatable for its era. And Watchman should be able to be appreciated in this current era much better. If there had been a negative backlash with Watchman’s publication in the Fifites, would a book like Mockingbird have been accepted so widely and so well into the canon of classic American literature? I doubt so. Good for it to have unfolded as it has. Yes, the initial reaction to news of Watchman’s ultimate release, that how will the adoring public react to Atticus being portrayed with flaws and prejudices, was well founded. But I find the book doesn’t really tarnish Atticus’ image. It alters it, yes, but I find it important that we should see the more realistic portrayal of him. It only adds “character” to his character. And his portrayal wasn’t quite as negative as people feared. I didn’t find the new Atticus to be a racist, but rather a cultural “stick-in-the-mud.” His character has a lot of relevance today as we see debates of the Confederate flag being cast as either a racist symbol or a mere symbol of Southern culture. Atticus is more trying to protect what he views as the goodness of Southern culture. His age and the age in which he lived skews his view perhaps to not see that the good Southern culture that he wishes to preserve was only made possible by the diminishing of the Negro race, and keeping the status quo was the only means of maintaining what he grew up enjoying as a white resident of Alabama in the first half of the 20th century. In modern terms, this is defined as “white privilege,” and Atticus has a natural defensiveness to what he sees as threats to this privilege. Granting blacks instant full civil rights would certainly upset his apple-cart. But that doesn’t make him a racist. Jean Louise, representing the younger generation, the changing of the times, the vanguard really of new thinking for white Southerners, has the widened perspective of progressive thinking, living in New York City as a young adult in the Fifties, which allows her to see the insidiousness of the Jim Crow-era South. Her dilemma is a wonderful dramatic conflict. How do you remain proud of your good and decent Southern upbringing when you realize it is severely tainted and rotten at its core? The goodness of the decent upbringing that Jean Louise received from Atticus was tainted, not only by the enslavement of Negroes in the prior century, but also the continuation of treating them as second-class citizens and tolerated racism from others in her community in her current time. She has the right to have admiration for her upbringing which produced the goodness within her, but she is also right for abhorring the intrinsic evil contained within it, and for her eagerness to exorcise it from the culture in a swift revolution. While she is not afraid of what such a revolution would bring, Atticus is. And the conflict between them makes for high literary drama. Atticus symbolizes the good qualities of Southern culture, but his resistance to swift change mirrors the long, slow progression of change in the American South. Yes, we needed more Atticus Finches with the courage to stand up to racism when confronted with it. This would lead to cultural shifts away from tolerated racism. But we also needed more Jean Louise “Scout” Finches to move to a new level of enlightenment, where eradication of racism is the primary goal, instantly, now and forever. Hopefully this book will be taught in schools as well. It has a lot to offer.

With all that's been said about Harper Lee's new (second? First? Found? First draft?) book, Go Set a Watchman, it's been hard to form a fully realized opinion. Even before I had opened my copy, social media exploded with denunciations. Still, with that depressing prelude--who wants to read something that is the subject of a public pillory?--I read it anyway. To be honest, I was disappointed. I passed judgement on the novel as a mishmash of ideas, heavy on dialogue and light on action. Worst, it committed the cardinal sin of messing Atticus Finch, a character I cherished. In short, my knee jerk response was not very different from anyone else's. And yet, since finishing a week ago, I haven't been able to let the book go. There was something unsettling to me about how blithely the publication of the novel had been perceived as a greedy money grab by the publisher. The book isn't horrible, though it is a little disappointing, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to understand what I had read. A friend opined that in future years the two books (To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman) would be read together as part of literature classes, and it got me wanting to understand better. And so, I've begun to evolve my opinions about Go Set a Watchman. It is better--no, it is more nuanced--than I initially judged it. More, Atticus is perhaps more nuanced than To Kill a Mockingbird. It is without a doubt worth a read. Review: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee Harper Lee A little about where the book comes from. According to the publisher, the book was found in Lee’s archives, where she had forgotten that it still existed. In a press release from HarperCollins, Lee explained: "In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman. It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout's childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn't realized it had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years." Needless to say, there are plenty who doubt the authenticity of the statement or Lee’s willingness to step into the spotlight. New Republic’s William Giraldi is typical of this group: "Those crafty touches—“much thought and hesitation,” “my dear friend,” “people I trust”—are trying a tad too hard, wouldn’t you say? The spotlight-shunning Lee is “amazed” that she will once again be subjected to a freshet of attention, the very soaking she’d organized her life to avoid. The only thing amazing here is the expectation that literate people would be hoodwinked by attributed language that bears hallmarks of subterfuge." To_Kill_a_MockingbirdYeah. No pulling punches there. Denunciations range from accusations that her agent/attorney bypassed Lee (plenty of snarky comments about the corporate greed of publishing CEOs), that she is too old and senile to know what she's doing, that the book was never really lost in the first place, and, finally, that publication is a coup due to the recent passing of Lee’s longtime caretaker and counsel. It doesn’t hurt that since Lee had a stroke in 2007 she is said to have trouble seeing and has almost completely lost her hearing. From there it’s not much of a leap for naysayers to dismiss Go Set a Watchman as the greedy exploitation of an aged and famous writer. The problem? For every denunciation, there is also evidence to the contrary. No less than the New York Times quoted family and friends from Lee’s community that claimed that they had seen her recently and that she was a spry and alert as ever. "Other people who have seen Ms. Lee more recently say that she is physically frail but completely lucid. Mr. Nurnberg described her as “feisty” when he visited her this month. He said that while she was “indeed hesitant” to publish the book, she had been persuaded by a close circle of people who had read it and assured her that it stood up to her monumental first book. "Wayne Flynt, an Alabama author and historian who has been close friends with Ms. Lee for more than a decade, said she was as sharp as ever when he visited her on Monday, quoting lines from “Macbeth.” "“I don’t think that anybody that says she’s demented has been to see her in the last 10 years,” Mr. Flynt said. “The problem may be that almost nobody goes to see her, almost nobody gets in. She’s such a private person.”" zeplinstumblrcom (1)Nevertheless, as Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind, we are not scientists seeking truth, but lawyers seeking supporting evidence of our theses. Or, as the slightly more well-known Taylor Swift puts it, haters gonna hate. People find the evidence to fit the thesis they want. In practice, it didn’t take the internet long to jump to absolute dismissal of the entire book. Reducio ad absurdum: the book is an absolute mess and, according to all too many folk who have yet to read the book themselves, should not be read. To be fair, the one person I know who did read the book was disappointed. Writers don’t tell him how to do his job, and so he won’t tell writers how to do his, he said. Fair enough. He read and evaluated it for himself. Which leads to an important point: the difference between reading and passing judgement versus taking your opinion from what the internet mob tells you. Doing the homework--reading the book--is just too hard. This isn’t an idle gripe, either, or me playing a book snob card. Taking the judgments of the social media jury cum mob as legit is a real and harmful effect on the intellectual life of the average American. American intellectual life shouldn't be rooted in the ivory towers of higher education. On the contrary, healthy democracy sees the working class self-informing and educating, reading and discussing. Sure, elite academics, intellectuals and writers have a place, and I don’t mean to diminish their role. But regular people need to participate, need to engage, and need to decide for themselves what is worthy. If we only “reshare” across social media ad infinitum the gilded opinions of those smarter than ourselves, we are not only selling ourselves short, but also reducing our ability to pass informed judgement. Go read the book yourself. This is Harper freaking Lee we’re talking about. Even if the book is a failure, the woman produced what is arguably the most famous, most loved, and most memorable American novel of the last century. Something can be learned from such a mind. There'll never another To Kill a Mockingbird, but something can still be gleaned from Go Set a Watchman. So...what about the book itself? A failure? A first draft? A worthy successor to Lee’s legacy? Let’s look. First off, caveat: as a book reviewer: I’m no Allan Bloom, James Wood or Adam Kirsch. Take this with a grain of salt. From the minute I started Go Set a Watchman, I quickly fell into the writing. Lee’s style is as drawling and comfortable as the accents of the Deep South cast that fills its pages. And yet, the dialogue is often trite, the story jumbled, and the plot occasionally incongruous. Overall, it still feels like a first draft…which is exactly what the Lee’s editor thought when Lee shopped it around mid-century New York. And yet, there’s more to it than can be dismissed with vague complaints about the destruction of the Atticus Finch character as a bigot (Michiko Kakutani says that readers will be shocked by Atticus’s “affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares [Scout's] horror and confusion” and indeed, initially at least, this was my reaction). Sure, there is racism, but it's more the McGuffin of the story, as Jason Pettus portrays it in his review, than the theme. So back to my experience. After flying through the first two-thirds of the novel, I got bogged down and slogged through to the end. Go Set a Watchman takes place decades after To Kill a Mockingbird and indeed, it is the flashbacks in the book that Lee cribbed for the earlier published novel. In this iteration, Atticus has grown old, joined the local citizens committee that is synonymous with the Dixiecrat groups of the era that passed Jim Crow laws, forced legislatures to raise the Confederate battle flag over state capitals, and generally were responsible for much of the racism that seems so out of place today. Still, his racism feels circumstantial, a factor of his era, and if he is a bigot, he is the outlier among his people, making the best of the bad. And yet, there’s something in how Atticus is portrayed that falls short of the poisonous bigot that arm chair liberals denounce. Atticus is just not that simple, though it took me a bit of time to put my finger on why. Pettus’ review, again: "[T]here were plenty of reasons for Southerners to get behind racist organizations like these back then besides just pure racism; take Scout's enlightened fiancée, for example, who joins the citizens' council for the same reason he might join the Rotary Club, because he's a rising young lawyer and to not do so would damage his career. Or take Atticus himself, who as we learn by the end of the book hasn't really changed his stance towards black people from how he felt twenty years ago -- his joining the citizens' council has almost nothing to do with hating a man for the color of his skin, and almost everything to do with his obsessive belief in state rights versus a big federal government, and with his personal identity as a Jeffersonian liberal who believes that people need to "earn" the privileges of a free democracy by being informed, conscientious citizens who contribute to the greater good, not to have those privileges ram-rodded down everyone's throats by a meddling organization like the NAACP." Atticus’ concerns aren’t about racism so much as the interference of outsiders who don’t know or understand the local nuances, let alone have a vested interest in the future of the communities they parachute in to change. Atticus is concerned about the impact on the Constitution, on personal liberties, etc., in the “noble but misguided name of forcing "equality" on a situation that politically and economically can't handle it, complaints that even the urban liberal Scout sometimes agrees with over the course of the book[,]” argues Pettus. Yes, Atticus still behaves like a racist but, and this has been largely ignored, he would still be the first to defend a black man falsely accused. Which is entirely consistent with Atticus Finch that we all know and admire. If Lee has a theme here, it may be that life is much more complicated than the more simplistic black hat/white hat world she portrays in To Kill a Mockingbird. Could Lee have released the Go Set a Watchman right now for reasons other than the money (and let’s just all agree that the publisher doesn’t need other motives)? Could she be looking back at her legacy, recognizing that the simplistic morality of To Kill a Mockingbird is an unsatisfactory depiction of her view of the world? Judge for yourself. Pick up Go Set a Watchman, read it and consider if it isn’t more about the complexities of human relationships, of memory and of the passage of time than about racism and justice. It may not be the book that I wanted or expected, but I wonder if perhaps the judgments levied are perhaps too simplistic.

I really hated to see this book come out with all the hyper and noise. It made me really scared to read the book. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. This is a first book for Lee, and all like all new authors, she is finding her voice. The beginning is pretty rocky, but she finds more assurance as she goes along. Ignore what you have heard, read the book with understanding it was a first book, also keep in mind today's politically correct mindset, was different then. A good measure of how we have grown and attitudes have (hopefully) changed. Just read it for yourself. ***** Be warned ***** my view of Go Set A Watchman contains SPOILERS, but I couldn’t see how to express my thoughts without touching on a few points (many already discussed in the countless reviews before the book hit the shelves). I finished Go Set a Watchman this morning and have so many thoughts about the novel. For one, I think the media flap over Atticus being less than a paragon was hardly more than the publisher sending out PR stories to up their sales. At some point they took a look and saw presales were not hitting the big money mark that they had greedily anticipated, so they set out to create a mountain out of a molehill; with the help of a few reviews of outrage, they fueled the sensationalism-hungry media and social networks, the pursuing flap drove everyone out to buy it to see for themselves. Well, perhaps there is a lesson there – never truly judge a book by its cover – or rather, we need to pay smaller heed to the fray and just read it for yourself. You might be surprised. I was. I went in to buying the book feeling concern for Harper Lee. Had she been taken advantage of? Did she even pen the book? Some of the circumstances of the “finding” of the novel have been called into question by various sources. This came on the heels of Lee having to sue to get her rights for To Kill A Mockingbird back from the nephew of her former agent, that she had been duped into signing them away, even an investigation into concerns of abuse of the beloved author, who had trouble seeing and hearing and no champion to protect her. It was a murky whirlpool of speculation that saw the book making it into print. I know one thing without a doubt –– Go Set A Watchman was penned by Harper Lee. The book is hers. Unpolished in places and dealing with a period of growth for the nation, it wasn’t a pretty picture she painted, but it was an honest one from her stand point and typical for the era. But beneath the shaky start to the book, you hear Lee’s beautiful prose ringing clear, especially when you go through the flashbacks of Jem, Dill and Atticus. There is a tendency to see this book as a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird. It begins with a grown up Jean-Louise Finch returning home for her annual visit to Maycomb, Mississippi. Atticus is now aging, nearly eighty-years-old, and fighting to retain his pride though crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. He needs Jean-Louise home, but is too proud to ask her. Instead, his sister (which we met in To Kill A Mockingbird) is there to help him through his everyday life. Jem is gone, lost to a sudden heart attack – the same thing that had claimed their mother when Jean-Louise was too young to recall. You have a sense throughout the whole story that Scout hasn’t truly grieved over the loss of her hero brother, hasn’t been able to let him go. It gives you a sense that he is still alive for her, as long as she keeps him locked in the cocoon of childhood memories. Dill is spoken of, but never plays a role in the book outside of flashbacks. You sense a detachment from her beloved childhood friend, which mirrors Harper Lee’s own estrangement from Truman Capote (the model for Charles Baker Harris). And beloved Calpurnia, who served as mother to Jean-Louise, is now retired. Their reunion is bittersweet and tears at the heart. Other characters from To Kill A Mockingbird are scattered about, lending an instant familiarity, but their roles are changed in various ways. Walter Cunningham, who got her in trouble with that “dumb lady teacher”, is no longer that poor little boy who pours molasses all over his plate, the son of the man who works off his entailment by bringing nuts to the Finch house early in the morn –– the only form of payment he can afford. Instead, Walter owns the Maycomb ice cream parlor, built on the land where Scout’s old home once stood. In the first few chapters you hear a young writer struggling to find her voice. The first three have a flat, detached feel to them, almost another voice, almost like Lee was trying to sound like an author rather than be one. The harder she tried the farther she got away from her own natural magic. Other times, she’s dead on target and straight from her heart. As the book progresses you are treated to remembrances of Jem, Dill and Atticus. Oddly enough, there is no mention of Boo Radley. There is a mention of a trial, an echo of Tom Robinson’s, but this young black man, accused of rape by a white woman, lost his arm to the sawmill instead of the cotton gin, and this time Atticus saw him acquitted. Seeds planted that would come full force and be the center of Atticus’ great journey in To Kill a Mockingbird. All these changes see Watchman a sequel, and yet not truly a sequel. You quickly sense there are two voices struggling within the character – Jean-Louise in the present, but also Scout who never truly went away. She has moved to New York, tried to be worldlier. Instead, she just put a veneer over the shy, tomboy that never quite fit in. It’s that duality of the book, which took a few chapters for Harper Lee to master. Through the unfolding of the story, we learn Jean-Louise is really just Scout in an adult’s skin. It’s the battle between who she thinks she is, and who she truly is that causes most of her misery. She still sees the town and Atticus through Scout’s eyes. Following Scout’s recollections as she grew we learn, while horribly bright and encouraged to read about everything, she is quite backward about life in general –– terrified she is dying when her first period comes, which evolved later into nearly nine months of wretchedness after she mistakenly thinks she’s pregnant from French kissing Walter Cunningham. Currently, she loves Henry, the boy next door, but she’s not in love with him. In many ways the young man, best friend to Jem, has stepped into Jem’s shoes for Atticus. What to do? She hates the town she grew up in with a passion, yet loves it and wants to cling to the past with equal measure. She’s horrified Atticus could have ever attended a KKK meeting, but in Jean-Louise’s simplified view of life, there are no grays. It never occurs to her Atticus was a man who moved through Maycomb, handled legal matters, dealt with judges, lawyers, politicians and businessmen, and it was vital for him to know which ones hid behind a mask. Scotland has a saying, you hold your friends close, and your enemies closer. Atticus was merely following that sage adage. However, Jean-Louise cannot see beyond the surface, only that Atticus had done something that went against everything she believed he was. As we grow our perceptions of the world changes. We learn, accept, reject and are changed by the various trials and tribulations. Jean-Louise didn’t change. She was still Scout inside, still clinging to her childish views of life, her hometown and the people she loved. Much like Lee herself. Go Set a Watchman is a worthy companion to the later To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s different in many ways. It’s a first book of an author, and showcases the shining talent of that writer finding her way, of becoming a wordsmith that would go on to turn out a masterpiece. I think it’s an example, showing any author how to take their novel and go back and do second, third or fourth drafts to take a good story and make it something special. Some of the writing, where Jean-Louise is examining the views on race relations of the period, Lee wanders between a Joan of Arc mentality to mounting a very preachy soapbox. Much can and will likely be made of her simplistic views of the period, of good and evil, of the town’s resistance to the coming end to segregation. For those too young to recall the ugly face of history, you will probably judge the book harsher than those of you who lived through the upheavals and changes and understand the complexities first hand. Frankly, I was scared to read the book after all the hoopla in the media. I so loved To Kill a Mockingbird that I feared this book would destroy that love somehow. She says Maycomb had once been told it had nothing to fear but fear itself. I supposed I should have recalled that line. In the end, I laughed, I cried, and I was sad when the book ended. And extremely sad such a wonderful, wonderful writer never penned more books for the world to enjoy. I loved this book almost as much as I do To Kill A Mockingbird. Harper Lee has said she is Boo. The summer we started so long ago has ended and Boo has finally come out. When considering this book one needs to recall what Lee wrote about Atticus saying never judge someone until you’ve climbed into his shoes and walked around in them. That is good advice about reading Go Set a Watchman.

Harper Lee submitted this novel in 1957. It was rejected -- not because she was a poor writer, but because this was a flawed book. First, the flaws: 1) The book is a series of short stories and speeches. It's not a parable (like To Kill a Mockingbird), but a sermon. As Robert McKee would say, it's "on the nose." 2) Both the adult Scout and Atticus AGREE on things that we would find abhorrent today -- that blacks are in their infancy, and that the Supreme Court decision was badly rendered. Atticus leaves it at that, although Scout thinks it was wrongly done, but necessary anyway. The disturbing aspect of the book is that NEITHER side of the "conflict" has a different set of assumptions. 3) Nothing is properly dramatized; it's just argued. 4) The conclusion doesn't work -- but it contains a germ of an idea that became the triumph of Mockingbird. Now the strengths: 1) The characters are real. They FEEL like real people, in all their ambiguities between goodness and bad. In this respect it is even better than Mockingbird, which has a too perfect Atticus. 2) The flashbacks are outstanding writing. If I were an editor rejecting this book I would ask for ANOTHER book which focused on the child Scout instead of the adult -- which is precisely what happened. 3) This book reflects the reality of Southern conflict in the 1950s. I've listed the shared assumptions of black inferiority as a weakness, but the truth is that this WAS indeed the mindset of that time. The problem is that the writer couldn't properly transcend those assumptions (a weakness) even though she stated them more clearly than I've ever seen in print (a strength). Is it canon? No. I had to think long and hard about this, because the characters really are the same characters. But this book was written BEFORE Mockingbird and rejected. Atticus was based on Harper Lee's father in the early 1950s -- who WAS at that time a segregationist. That book took one year to write. The multi-year REWRITE became Mockingbird -- not as a rewrite of that plot, but as a rewrite of those characters. In the interval between those two books, Harper Lee's father changed his mind about segregation. He began as the Atticus of Watchman and became the Atticus of Mockingbird. In order to properly be "canon", the Atticus from Mockingbird to Watchman has to work as a single individual in that timeline. Instead, his changed character reflected a real man (her actual father) in a timeline working in the opposite direction. The segregationist BECAME the Atticus we came to love. If read as canon, then the Atticus we came to love would have become the segregationist. That doesn't mean it cannot be read as "canon." Certainly the cognitive dissonance Scout experiences in the Citizen's Council becomes our own in reading the book. It seems like canon in that respect, and can certainly be read that way if one desired (that is, Atticus would be for separate [Watchman] but equal [Mockingbird]). But my take on canonicity is drawn from the fact that Atticus is a facsimile of Harper's own father, who grew between those novels -- from the father of Watchman into the father of Mockingbird. This book is required reading if you want to learn how to write and to be encouraged to do so. Watchman is clunky, awkward, with flashes of raw brilliance. It is a book that CANNOT be fixed, yet with characters that can be recreated into something marvelous. Harper Lee was rejected -- and overcame that rejection with a rewrite of those same characters in a different setting of a changed plot and a different presentation. From the sermon of Watchman came the parable of Mockingbird. And in each Lee ended the novel with the same thematic trick: to show that Scout HERSELF (and therefore the reader) has been bigoted the whole time. The entire point of bigotry is that we are unaware of it. It is the logical or emotional conclusion of our assumptions -- and until those assumptions themselves are exposed, the bigotry remains invisible. In the final pages of Watchman we realize that we are anti-Southern bigots. In the final pages of Mockingbird we realize that we are anti-Boo Radley bigots. Boo is no longer a stated value but a metaphor for ANYTHING or ANYONE we have wrongly feared. Mockingbird IS the final version of Watchman -- and therefore Watchman is not canon in that respect. But it IS essential reading for a writer who wants to rise from failure and rejection. First, read Mockingbird. Then, read Watchman. Finally, read Mockingbird again as the resurrection of characters from a flawed plot. If read in that way, this book could become infinitely meaningful -- not as a narrative of disillusion toward a character -- but rather as an example of resurrection as a writer. I could write better than Watchman. I will never write better than Mockingbird. Harper Lee spanned both extremes -- giving hope for the rest of us who would love to write, and have lacked the guts to keep doing so.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the controversies surrounding this book—regarding the timing and nature of its release, and the shocking reveals in the book itself, particularly the discovery that Atticus Finch, one of the most idolized characters in American literature, is a racist. Even though I pre-ordered the book, I worried that I’d risk ruining To Kill a Mockingbird for myself. However, when I received my copy on release day, I accepted that Go Set a Watchman was now in the hands of the public, for better or worse, and I decided I would make every effort to put aside all the controversies and read it on its own merits. To try and make of it anything more or less than what it is would be unfair to the author, in my opinion. And to my surprise, I ended up really liking Go Set a Watchman. I just started reading it a second time, in fact, the better to appreciate it. In the hope that I might help another reader decide whether or not to crack open this book, here are some of the things I kept in mind while reading: • In his review for The Guardian, Mark Lawson says, “The first problem in assessing Harper Lee’s first published novel in the five and a half decades since To Kill a Mockingbird is whether to describe it as her first or second book. … Chronologically, Go Set a Watchman is, in Hollywood arithmetic, a sort of Mockingbird 2, depicting the later lives of the Finch family … However, in computing terms, Watchman is Mockingbird 1.0 to the Mockingbird 2.0 of the novel that was previously the 89-year-old Lee’s single published work.” I decided to take the Mockingbird 1.0 view. • I thought of Watchman as a fascinating artifact from a parallel universe: What if Harper Lee’s editors had chosen to work with this draft—polish it up, revise the structure and pacing, but retain the basic storyline—instead of urging Lee to do a complete rewrite, which eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird? • The Bible verse the title is taken from sets the theme of the book. Isaiah 21:6 (KJV) says, “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.” This isn’t very telling, but it came together for me in verse 9: “And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.” It did help to find out ahead of time that Atticus is revealed as a racist, because it certainly was a shock. Reading this passage from Isaiah also helped. I understood immediately that Babylon for Jean Louise (Scout) Finch is her beloved Maycomb, and the “graven images,” or idols, are the godly pedestals upon which she put all her loved ones, particularly her father Atticus and her childhood friend Hank. And here are the merits I appreciated in Go Set a Watchman: • This is not just a story about Jean Louise uncovering her beloved Atticus as a flawed human being; more broadly, this is a story about a young woman experiencing the painful but necessary transition of becoming her own person. I really identified with this aspect of Watchman. • The overall tone of Watchman, perhaps heavy-handed at times but no less truthful, is the old adage, “You can never go home again.” Before the big reveal about Atticus’ racist views, Jean Louise realizes upon coming home from New York for a visit that her gilt-edged childhood memories of Maycomb do not match up to what greets her in the present. One of my favorite passages is a conversation about Jean Louise’s discovery that a favorite haunt, Finch’s Landing, no longer belongs to her family but has been sold off to a hunting club. Childhood friend Hank teases Jean Louise about her disappointment: “I believe you are the worst of the lot. Mr. Finch is seventy-two years young and you’re a hundred years old when it comes to something like this.” To which Jean Louise replies: “I just don’t like my world disturbed without some warning.” • Although there is a lot of alienation and pain in this story, there are also many delightful moments in which Lee reveals a fondness for the South in which she grew up. Another favorite passage of mine is when Jean Louise returns to an ice cream shop after recognizing its owner as Mr. Cunningham: “She was sitting at a table behind Mr. Cunningham’s ice cream shop, eating from a wax-paper container. Mr. Cunningham, a man of uncompromising rectitude, had given her a pint free of charge for having guessed his name yesterday, one of the tiny things she adored about Maycomb: people remembered their promises.” I love details like this, and as a Southerner I also enjoyed Lee’s vivid sketches of the Maycomb people, which rang true to me. • Watchman contains some heartwarming flashbacks with Jem, Dill, and Calpurnia, as well as a couple of telling scenes about Jean Louise’s early friendship with Hank. Yes, the flashbacks are a bit jarring to the flow and pacing, but recognizing that Watchman is not a fully polished final draft, I still treasured these scenes as precious insights into beloved characters I never imagined I’d be able to read in my lifetime. • As Michiko Kakutani points out in her review for The New York Times, “One of the emotional through-lines in both ‘Mockingbird’ and ‘Watchman’ is a plea for empathy … The difference is that ‘Mockingbird’ suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while ‘Watchman’ asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus.” What I got from reading Watchman is that while Atticus is still Atticus in many of the ways readers have adored him for decades, he is very much a flawed, prejudiced human being. Watchman does not in any way excuse Atticus’ racist views toward African-Americans, but it does encourage the reader, along with Jean Louise, to take Mr. Finch down from the godly pedestal and understand him as a mortal. I believe Lee is also urging readers to look inside ourselves and realize we all harbor prejudices of some kind.

There's been a lot of controversy surrounding the publication of GO SET A WATCHMAN, which has been universally recognized as the first draft of what would eventually become Harper Lee's magnificent TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. WATCHMAN, written several years before MOCKINGBIRD, tells the story of 26-year-old Jean Louise Finch who returns to her childhood home of Maycomb, Alabama to visit her 72-year-old father, Atticus Finch. At first, the visit is bathed in the patina of memories and nostalgia - Jean Louise remembers the smells, the sounds, and the people she grew up with, and she resents the changes that have taken place (Atticus has left the house where Jean Louise was born and built himself a new place that doesn't quite feel the same). The first third of the novel is slow-paced and wistful, with Jean Louise flirting with childhood friend and maybe-fiancé, Hank Clinton, now her father's law partner. She spars with her Aunt Alexandra (who berates her for wearing "slacks" in town) and her Uncle Jack (whose conversation is steeped in metaphor and allusion). It isn't until she learns that Atticus and Hank are both part of the Maycomb County Citizen's Council, an organization bent on preventing racial integration, that the plot really begins. The Atticus we see here - a man determined to preserve the identity of a South torn asunder, first by emancipation and then by Supreme Court decisions - is not the Atticus Jean Louise remembers from her childhood. She thought of him as a God, and we who so loved both the book and movie versions of MOCKINGBIRD did, too. But WATCHMAN has a message that's far more complex than its more famous counterpart. Because Atticus is not a God. He's also not evil, even in his need to protect his world from the kind of change that cannot come easily. WATCHMAN isn't the uplifting, lovely novel that MOCKINGBIRD is. But in many ways, by being Jean Louise's story more than Atticus's, it's bigger and more important. From everything I've read, it's clear that Harper Lee never intended to publish WATCHMAN. She submitted it to publishers who suggested she rework it focusing on Jean Louise's childhood, and the result was MOCKINGBIRD. I can see why they gave Lee this advice - the childhood memories in WATCHMAN (and there are many) are among its most identifiable elements. We get to see Jean Louise again when she was Scout, and we get to see Jem and Dill in all their glory. There is a reference to the trial of Tom Robinson, which makes up the central conflict in MOCKINGBIRD. In WATCHMAN, however, Robinson is not named, he seems much younger (a boy), and his "rape" of a 14-year-old white girl is proven to have been consensual (yes, Atticus gets him off). Most of the rest of the stories and memories in WATCHMAN are new, covering Scout's school years (including high school, first dates, dances, and embarrassments). I loved her and Jem and Dill and young Hank (a character who does not show up in MOCKINGBIRD), and I would have read this for those sections alone. But this isn't a book about children. Instead, it's a book about change, and how difficult it is to get people to let go of their identities and move forward into the future, even if that future is necessary and right. The setting of WATCHMAN is the summer of 1954. The Supreme Court has just ruled (in Brown vs. the Board of Education) that "separate but equal" cannot stand - no longer would states be able to avoid racial integration by setting up separate schools for Negroes. Jean Louise believes in states' rights, so she isn't a fan of the Court's ruling (she believes it violates the 10th Amendment). But she does believe in racial equality and in integration, and she considers herself "color blind," things she believes she learned from her father. But when Atticus finally tells her what he believes - that neither Southern whites nor blacks are ready for forced integration, whether it be in the schools or the voting booth - it shakes her to her core. And the conversations she has with both Atticus and her Uncle Jack reveal a lot about how enlightened Southern white men thought in the 1950's. Parts of it are very hard to read, especially coming from the mouth of beloved Atticus Finch. But it's also a very honest portrayal of issues that are still front-and-center in American life and politics today. It's easy to say that the Atticus we meet in WATCHMAN isn't the same man as the kind, loving, God-like father in MOCKINGBIRD. Since seeing the 1962 movie, I've always heard Gregory Peck's voice when I've read Atticus's words - and that's exactly what I heard when I read WATCHMAN. This is Atticus, but a much older Atticus who is trying to protect the only world he's ever known. He has no hate in his heart for black people, and he truly does believe in equality (this is a man who waits in line behind black people in the grocery store even though the white store owner would happily serve him first). But he does call the Negro people "backward," and he compares them to children who are not ready to cast a vote or play a part in government. Atticus says to Jean Louise, "Do you want your children going to a school that's been dragged down to accommodate Negro children?" She is horrified, and she accuses him of denying that blacks are human. He calmly tells her that change can't be forced upon people until they're ready. It reminded me of a line from Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play, "A Raisin in the Sun": Mr. Lindner, a white man trying to prevent a black family from moving into his white neighborhood, says, "You just can't force people to change their hearts." That's pretty much what Atticus is trying to tell Jean Louise. At the same time, Atticus recognizes in his daughter the very spirit and commitment that will ultimately bring the kind of change he knows must happen. She is a product of her upbringing - she was raised by a white man and a black woman (Calpurnia, who was Atticus's housekeeper since the death of his wife when Jean Louise was two). She is Atticus's daughter, in her beliefs, her humanity, and yes, in her color-blindness. And if she represents the changed world yet to come, Atticus represents a past which is so very hard to let go of. I did enjoy reading GO SET A WATCHMAN, and I do think it makes a nice companion piece to MOCKINGBIRD. The issues raised here are the kinds of things people should be thinking about and talking about. I'm very glad this novel was published. I highly recommend it to anyone willing to be challenged.

Almost everyone knows how Go Set a Watchman got published -- Lee is now infirm and rumored to no longer be of sound mind. Her lawyer "discovered" this lost manuscript. In fact Watchman was a first draft of the novel that was sent to editor Tay Hohoff in 1957. Hohoff rejected the manuscript and suggested many changes and eventually all those changes and rewrites became To Kill a Mockingbird. Watchman is not a sequel to Mockingbird. It is not an alternate version. It's a first draft, and one can argue about the ethics about publishing it altogether -- would Beethoven have wanted his initial scribblings of his symphonies published and played by orchestras? The revelation that Harper Lee's "long-lost" novel Go Set A Watchman gave the sainted Atticus Finch a "dark side" made the front pages of the New York Times for days and caused the predictable teeth-gnashing that one of the most beloved literary characters's reputation is somehow ... tarnished? Atticus in this book is not the same Atticus who defended an innocent black man and urged his children to be kind and unprejudiced. He's an infirm man who is vehemently against the NAACP and is outraged at the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. He's even joined the "Maycomb Citizens' Council," a club that's dedicated to preserving, well, the Southern way of life. I sat and read Go Set a Watchman and if there's any literary character assassination, it's not really Atticus. Atticus in Watchman is so distantly drawn, so opaque of a figure, that one can easily just forget about him as soon as the book is over. The real disappointment, one that's harder to shake, is that the "Jean Louise Finch" of Watchman is NOTHING like "Scout Finch" of To Kill A Mockingbird. Mockingbird's Scout was a precocious, intelligent child. Watchman's Jean Louise Finch plays like a clichéd heroine from a young adult novel, and an annoying one at that. When one reads Watchman the first thing that jumps out on the page is how thinly sketched every character is compared to the richly drawn Southern gothic counterparts in Mockingbird. "Jean Louise Finch" is a whiny, over-dramatic twenty-something year old and most of her storyline is dominated by a romance with Henry Clinton, a lawyer in Atticus's firm. She's 26, lives in New York, comes back home to Maycomb, Alabama, and discovers to her shock that Atticus is not perfect, Henry is prejudiced as well, Calpurnia no longer really recognizes her and Aunt Alexandra is still very, very annoying. The end. Oh, Jem is dead. Remember how Scout was a tomboy, who was also really smart and capable? Well here's Jean-Louise: "Although she was a respectable driver, she hated to operate anything mechanical more complicated than a safety pin: folding lawn chairs were a source of profound irritation to her; she had never learned to ride a bicycle or use a typewriter; she fished with a pole." To get a flavor of the of the love interest in this novel, here's an excruciating passage with Henry: "I don't even love you like that anymore. I've hurt you but there it is." Yes, it was she talking, with her customary aplomb, breaking his heart in a drugstore. Well, he'd broken hers. Henry's face became blank, reddened, and its scar leaped into prominence. "Jean Louise, you can't mean what you're saying." "I mean every word of it." Hurts, doesn't it? You're damn right it hurts. You know how it feels, now. Jean-Louise is outraged that her father and Henry have joined the Maycomb Citizens' Council but in the climax of the book she has an argument with Atticus which reveals that she's as bigoted as Atticus, if not worse. She also says that she was "furious" about the Brown vs. Board of Education decision because "they" were "tellin' us what to do again." She also agrees that the "Negro" population is "backward" and "unable to share the fully in the responsibilities of citizenship." In fact, her only defense of Brown is "Atticus, if you believe all that, then why don't you do right? I mean this, no matter how hateful the Court was, there had to be a beginning." The protracted argument with Atticus stems not from any disagreement with Atticus over the basic philosophy behind segregation but from Jean-Louise's fury that Atticus had brought her up believing all the things about fairness and colorblindness and now he's backtracking. In other words, like many of the millenials of today who post 100 selfies a day with hasthags like #lookingood and #nomakeup, it's all about me. But let's examine some of Lee's "wonderful" prose here: "Atticus, I'm throwing it at you and I'm gonna grind it in: you better go warn your younger friends that if they want to preserve Our Way of Life, it begins at home. It doesn't begin with the schools or the churches or anyplace at home. Tell 'em that, and use your blind, immoral, misguided, n___r-lovin' daughter as your example. Go in front of me with a bell and say, 'Unclean!' ... Point me out as your mistake. Point me out: Jean Louise Finch, who was exposed to all kinds of guff from the white trash she went to school with, but she might never have gone to school for all the influence it had on her. Everything that was Gospel to her she got at home from her father. You sowed the seeds in me, Atticus, and now it's coming home to you --" This is awful writing. But it only gets worse: after the blow-up with Atticus Jean Louise talks to her uncle "Dr. Finch" who tells her: "You're color blind. You always have been, you always will be. The only differences you see are between one human and another are differences in looks and intelligence and character and the like. You've never been prodded to look at people as a race, and now that race is the burning issue of the day, you're still unable to think racially. You see only people." Jean-Louise's response to that might the one (unintentionally) hilarious moment in this novel: "But Uncle Jack, I don't especially want to run out and marry a Negro or something." If this is Lee's version of racial enlightenment ... There's not a single character in Watchman that one wants to "follow" to the next page. Part of a writers' job is writing about characters that the reader cares about. Not good characters, not moral characters, not racially enlightened characters, but characters that attract interest and attention. Watchman is entirely devoid of any such characters, and thus any interest. You read it for the novelty factor and that's it. There are a couple things in Watchman that remind me of Mockingbird, but unfortunately they don't speak very well of Lee as a writer. You remember how in Mockingbird Harper Lee had this habit of introducing every character with a long expository history, instead of simply letting the character come alive by himself on the page? That habit is here in Watchman, except there's no colorful lines to make those expository character introductions more interesting. You remember how sometimes huge confrontations in Mockingbird were tidied up with a neat homily, like "You never really understand a person until you see things from his point of view"? Well, you see traces of that in Watchman. But without confrontations that hold any meaning, those neat homilies become even more irritating. It's interesting, then, to see that among all this trash, Hohoff rescued parts of Watchman that turned into Mockingbird. The "Tom Robinson" storyline in Mockingbird is drawn from a one paragraph description in Watchman about how Atticus once defended an unnamed black teen in a statutory rape case and won. In Watchman the story is told in such an impersonal, brief way that blink and you might miss it. The character of "Dill" is also taken from a brief passage about Scout's school days. "Aunt Alexandra" in Watchman is an insufferable and bigoted, but somehow Hohoff managed to make Lee rewrite her into a woman with a similar character, but enough pathos that she becomes a recognizable figure in the Southern gothic genre: the proud, lonely belle. Jean Louise's close relationship with Calpurnia as a child is also present in Watchman, except in a far more mundane storyline: Calpurnia talked Jean-Louise out of a phantom pregnancy scare. Other things one just has to assume were created by the author mining her imagination. Who knows where the Boo Radley story came from? It's not anywhere in Watchman. It became the heart of Mockingbird. Why is the relationship between Jem and Jean-Louise remembered as so cold and distant in Watchman, when it was warm and close in Mockingbird? How about Tom and Mayella Ewell? Sheriff Tate? These richly drawn characters are again missing in Mockingbird. I think most people who read To Kill a Mockingbird assumed that Scout was really Harper Lee, and Harper Lee was Scout. The novel is semi-autobiographical, and Lee worked many elements of her childhood and upbringing into the novel. Scout Finch's sharp observations, her love for her family and community, her integrity and moral compass -- I think most readers assumed that these were really the qualities of Harper Lee. The fact that Lee has led a reclusive life since the book's publication in 1960 has only added to the mystique. Harper Lee never crashed and burned the way her childhood friend Truman Capote (Dill in Mockingbird) did. It's like she wrote the book, and closed the curtain on her life permanently. Watchman is so poorly written, so devoid of anything that might even suggest the embryonic stages of a literary classic, that I started to wonder if that old rumor that Truman Capote had a heavy invisible hand in the writing of Mockingbird was correct. What's more, it made me think, is this Jean-Louise" Finch really Harper Lee? If these were her first thoughts about herself, then either she didn't give herself enough credit or Lee later created a Scout Finch that was less true to life but more appealing to readers. But all these debates about the ethics of publishing Watchman, who really were the invisible hands that shaped Mockingbird, how much of Harper Lee was put into both novels, is really a moot point at the end of the day. The fact is To Kill a Mockingbird is not a perfect book, but it's a book worth reading because it's well-written, interesting, and imaginative. In other words, a classic. Go Set a Watchman is none of those things.

Three and a half stars from me, and possibly a little more. It's hard to know what I would have felt about the novel if I had read it with no knowledge of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' But I found it highly readable, with memorable characters. It may not be a first person narrative (as its predecessor was), but it does have a lot of dialogue, and Scout's voice comes through loud and clear. Incidentally, it's a voice of its time: the voice of the sassy young woman you might hear in a screwball comedy of the 1940s -- though this novel is not a comedy as such. Spoiler alert: Some early reviewers complained that their hero Atticus is revealed as a racist. I don't think that that is entirely true, for while Atticus does speak of race, and does worry about the implications of a vote where the majority will come from an ill-educated black background, what he wants is a gradual incorporation of the negroes into the polity as they become more educated. And if he goes to hear a racist speak, it is on the grounds of toleration, and to 'know thy enemy'. Scout at least comes to accept this point of view, and I think Lee puts it forward as an open question, for us to think about. I suspect that Lee was thinking hard about the value of gentility she attributes to Atticus, aware of their virtues and also of the ways in which they did not cohere with northern liberal values. And I don't want to exonerate Atticus entirely, for many of us will think that he and his kind had an obligation to help black culture develop, rather than merely waiting for it to happen. What we should avoid is easy judgement.

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Another thilling adventure, loved it! Finally a Worth Reading continuation of an emotional and mature story! I highly recommend it!

There’s something particularly inspiring about a book that puts its reader through the same emotional wringer as its main characters. The classic example is Dangerous Liaisons, the great eighteenth-century French classic by Choderlos de Laclos. Its theme is seduction, and we follow the two main characters in their hugely ingenious and utterly callous seductions of innocent victims. They are so ingenious, so self-aware, so insightful on human nature, that we can’t help but admire them – they seduce us. But seduction is only complete when the victim is abandoned: that ultimate betrayal is an essential component of the process. And the end of the book leaves the reader abandoned, as his or her seducers are revealed… – well, I’m not going to include a spoiler to one exceptional novel in a review of another. Go set a watchman pulls off the same trick, at least if you read it after To Kill a Mockingbird. In the earlier book, we come to share the daughter Scout’s unbridled admiration for the fine figure of her father, Atticus Finch, great crusading lawyer in a racist Southern community. In the second novel (the second published even if it was the first written) follows Scout again, though as an adult she’s now mostly referred to as Jean Louise, as she discovers a different side of Atticus and, indeed, of all the most important figures from her childhood. Calpurnia, the black woman who was all but a mother to the motherless girl, can no longer be at ease with a white; her white relatives in the meantime are on the other side of the barricade that isolates Cal from Jean Louise, busily building it up as the Supreme Court starts to tear down some of the structures that have preserved the Southern way of life, specifically through school desegregation. We follow her on an educational journey towards disabuse and disillusion, and if we already know Mockingbird, we share all the associated feelings with her. That alone makes the novel excellent and well worth reading. That being said, the novel shows signs of insufficient editing. If the tale of how it came to press is true, that’s perhaps not surprising: Lee would not have been in a position to work enough on the text before it went for printing. So, for instance, I have no idea what the reference to a telephone is doing in the following paragraph: “Good morning, daughter of Nereus!” said her uncle, as he kissed her on the cheek. One of Dr. Finch’s concessions to the twentieth century was a telephone. He held his niece at arm’s length and regarded her with amused interest. But I enjoyed such minor asperities, which I felt underlined the quality of the writing overall. Look at the concision with which Lee conveys the fear and embarrassment of a motherless girl terrified as she unknowingly enters womanhood: …she was eleven and came home to dinner from school one day and found that her blood had begun to flow. She thought she was dying and she began to scream. Calpurnia and Atticus and Jem came running, and when they saw her plight, Atticus and Jem looked helplessly at Calpurnia, and Calpurnia took her in hand. The poignancy of the moment is all the greater with hindsight, when we discover that this black woman to whom the whole family turned for succour at a moment of crisis, no longer feels she can maintain the old intimacy with them. That truly underlines the long distance the community in Maycomb has travelled down a bad road. And the ending? Has the education of Jean Louise led her to accept the rationalisations by which her community now lives? Or will she stay true to her self-proclaimed colour blindness?

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel - more soon than it's predecessor although that might have more to do with my additional years than the book itself. After reading, I read a scathing critique from the Guardian, which to me had missed part of the point. That particular critic had almost definitely forgotten to laugh on page 2, forgotten to enjoy the book for what it is rather than trying to compare, and failed to see what else the book was saying. Yes, I suppose it will always have a place in black/white literature with all it describes. But to me, it was also a well-written, highly readable novel to do with growing up, returning to a place you thought you knew and where you want to feel at home, but the realisation that you have changed. It isn't perfect, no, but it is interesting, funny in part, thought-provoking and the prose flows well.