Harper Lee: Go Set A Watchman (Book Review)

[selenak]

The conference doesn't start until this afternoon, and I got up early, so I had the chance to read it - it's not a long novel. Overall verdict? As a novel - a debut novel, even, which it would have been had it been published when it was written - , it has both strenghts and weaknesses; you can see both why her editor rejected it in this form and

Comments

[sonetka]

I'm actually more interested in reading this now that I've read your review, though it definitely sounds like the ending suffers from exposition-dumping. I've only read TKAM once, and it wasn't assigned in school; we got things like Beloved, Native Son, and Light In August, and I read TKAM over a summer vacation and had a mental verdict which I later discovered was roughly the same as Flannery O'Connor's; it's very good, but it's a children's book. A lot of potential complexities are simply elided by Scout's worship of her father, as the first draft makes clear.

I didn't really get the shock over Older!Atticus believing in segregation. Fair-minded as he is when it comes to application of the law, considering his age and where he's been brought up, it would be very unusual for him to be otherwise. Of course, no modern young people will ever discover that they've reached an age where their basic assumptions about How The World Works are being rocked backwards and forwards. Naturally not :).

[selenak]

I think part of the shock is because Atticus has been made in such an icon during the suceeding decades. But part of the shock is within the narrative - i.e. not just does the grown up Scout feel it, but I think Lee wanted her reader to feel it, too, because Older!Atticus has been introduced as a very sympathetic, fair-minded individual.

Given Harper Lee was living in New York at the time, I wonder whether part of the reason was that she wanted her potential readers to see Southerners don't have to be gin-swilling red necks to believe in segregation? Her exposition-delivering uncle points out to Jean Louise her father, if the local Klan were to march to hang someone, would still step in their way at the risk of his own life to save the intended victim(s). At the same time, the same man is horrified at the prospect of potential grandchildren of his sharing the same school with people of colour. Which is far more complicated and painful than the situation in "To Kill a Mockingbird".

[cherrytide]

Very interesting review, thank you! I'm intrigued by this look at grown up Scout. I wonder how much of Harper Lee is in her.

[selenak]

I think both versions of Scout are very autobiographical without being identical. For example, a key difference is that Harper Lee's mother didn't die when she was a baby, the way Scout's mother did. Instead, Mrs. Lee tried to kill her daughter by drowning her in the bathtub, twice. (Harper Lee was saved by her older sisters, something else Scout doesn't have.) Mrs. Lee had these fits and otherwise was a crossword fiend, when she wasn't wandering up and down the streets and saying odd thigns to strangers. This type of mother, maternal rejection (no matter how due to mental illness - a child wouldn't understand this at first) must have had an impact which is totally missing in fictional Scout's life.

(It did contribute to young Harper Lee's bond with young Truman Not Yet Capote, who got rejected by his mother on a regular basis for being "a fairy" even as a kid as well.)

[zahrawithaz]

This is the best review I've read of this book, & the only one that actually makes me interested in reading the book (though Randall Kennedy's piece in the New York Times is also excellent, and comes to the same conclusion--we could have had a better book if the editor had asked Lee to focus on revising this one). I confess to not remember To Kill a Mockingbird much at all, except for the black defendant dying in prison in the end--it didn't make much of an impression. But the central emotional conflict of loving people who are invested in repugnant ideology is so easy to identify with, and resonates with me. It's a shame her writing isn't quite up to bringing it to the conclusion it deserves.

I love your analysis here, and it reminds me that we remember Lee for her literary talent as much or more than her social perspective in TKaM (which I think has been heavily dated for a while now).

[selenak]

I never saw TKaM as a social perspective book back when I read it, I thought it was a historical novel, as well as what's today called a YA novel and what I would have called a "children's novel" back then. That it included some "heavy" events didn't seem to contradict that - so did other children's novels I was reading. If much younger me would have had to compare it to another book, genre wise, it probably would have been Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn - the world TKaM was describing seemed very similar to the US South of Twain's book, though there wasn't slavery anymore, they both had child narrators, and it wouldn't have occured to me that one was set in the 19th century pre Civil War and one in the 1930s, because I didn't have enough context knowledge. I certainly didn't see it addressing anything I connected with my present

[ljlorettamartin]

So, what do you think of the conspiracy theory (not mine) that Truman Capote did a lot of the writing in To Kill a Mockingbird?

[selenak]

Nothing. Not his style, not his kind of story. Otoh, Harper Lee did a lot more work for In Cold Blood than Capote acknowledged when it was published, which was one reason why they drifted apart.