Novels

Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s recently published second novel about the community made famous in To Kill a Mockingbird, is largely a disappointment. The book is a sequel in the sense that it gives us a look at the Finch family several decades after the action of To Kill a Mockingbird, but a prequel in the sense that Lee actually wrote this book first. Her writing of Mockingbird grew from the advice of a savvy publisher who, on reading this novel in manuscript, told Lee that she should expand on the memories of childhood Scout describes in Watchman, and so To Kill a Mockingbird was born to instant acclaim.

Go-Set-a-WatchmanGo Set a Watchman is a totally different book in several ways, and my reaction was correspondingly different. In reviewing the book I’ll have to include spoilers, so — fair warning.

First, I felt this novel was uneven. One review called it “lumpy,” and that seems to fit. Its third person narrative seems to take forever to get moving, beginning as Jean Louise arrives home in Maycomb for her yearly two-week vacation. Details about characters and events from the past are clumsily packed in to these early pages as we learn about Jean Louise’s new place of residence (New York City — though we learn little about what she does there), and her boyfriend Hank, a protege of Atticus Finch who waits for her on the train platform and seems, on the whole, much more devoted to her than she is to him. Where the original Scout seemed likable for her honesty and keen observation, the grown Jean Louise seems merely disagreeable and self-absorbed. She treats Hank mostly as an annoyance and seems to regard her hometown and its people with a mixture of superiority and reverence that doesn’t quite come off successfully. Our real life emotions and attitudes are usually cross-grained, but Jean Louise seems to come across less as complex than merely incoherent.

Much has been said about Atticus’s racism in this novel. Jean Louise comes home to a town reacting to the Civil Rights Movement, and one of the ways Atticus (along with Hank) deals with it is to attend a meeting of a community organization at which a committed segregationist spouts racist rhetoric. Jean Louise feels betrayed and considers leaving forever, but a series of conversations — first with Atticus, then with his brother, a new character to readers — offers Lee’s resolution: love bears all things. In a sense this is a coming of age novel in which Jean Louise finally recognizes that her father is not a saint. Will she love him as a man, even if he is not on the moral pedestal she has always imagined?

I was not as surprised by Atticus’s actual attitudes about race as some other readers have been. I found them disappointing, but not necessarily contradictory to his attitudes in the first book. As I read, I remembered that the society of To Kill a Mockingbird was unequivocally segregated. Atticus takes a moral stand on behalf of a black man in that novel, but this has always struck me as saying more about his reverence for the law than for racial equality outside the courtroom. In Mockingbird, we see Atticus go into the black neighborhood to talk to his clients, but then he comes back out and returns to his home, where a black maid is taking care of the housework and rearing his children. Lee does not depict him as a social activist, but as a devotee of the law and due process. In Go Set a Watchman, the law changes, challenging his sense of the order of segregated society, and this throws into sharper focus racial attitudes that may be implicit in To Kill a MockingbirdGo Set a Watchman seems to interrogate Mockingbird, asking, “How deeply does your sense of justice extend into questions of race?” This, at least, is the way I understood Atticus’s character, and it helped to reconcile what many see as contradiction between the two novels. All that said, there is a sadness for the reader, as much as for Scout, in this disillusionment. It diminishes the moral clarity of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which the possibility that Atticus is at heart a segregationist would not have occurred to me if I had not read Watchman.

Though I was able to find a coherence (however tragic) in the treatment of race in the two novels, the narrative seemed to me very disjointed. New characters (Atticus’s sister and brother, Scout’s fiance) seem too dominant in the story. Flashbacks to Jean Louise’s childhood escapades do not seem related thematically to the main action of the novel. And Lee’s evocative anecdotes about Maycomb life have a self-consciousness that I found distracting and even ponderous at times. (Full disclosure: I dozed off more than once while reading.) Go Set a Watchman reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl, a work that was necessary to the author as one stage in identifying the story she wanted to tell, a work from which some ingredients may be pulled out and crafted into art, but not a great work on its own. This is not a book I consider required reading, and not one I would recommend. Its predecessor remains a great book, but one that stands better on its own.

4 Comments

  • Jeane Nevarez

    Only a few reviews like yours, have convinced me I’m not interested in reading this book. I think it would ruin my admiration of To Kill a Mockingbird. And its flaws are probably the very reason it was rejected for publication in the first place, during the author’s lifetime! Maybe it would have been better left alone… never brought to light for the public.

  • Karl Zedell

    I agree with you completely! I think that except for the opportunity for the publisher and author to make more money, this book does not deserve the light of day. It could have been fixed, but perhaps Lee is just not up to doing so at this point. It is obvious why the publisher turned it down the first time and that is great in the sense that we would have never seen Mockingbird without that rejection.