I downloaded Go Set A Watchman as soon as it was available on July 15, and I finished it yesterday. I’m just busting to say a few things about it, so…SPOILER ALERT!
The first part of the novel seemed rather light and breezy. Jean Louise had one comical argument after another with Henry and her aunt, and it was all very southern. I kept thinking of Truman Capote and Eudora Welty. It held my attention, and I liked it, but I kept wondering when we were going to get to the part that everyone was talking about.
The story became a little shaky for me when we were introduced to Jean Louise’s uncle, Dr. Jack Finch. There was a great effort to make him come across as eccentric, learned, funny and wise, but a bit fussy and disagreeable. However, when he launched into a rant about hymns that went on for several pages, my eyes started to glaze over. Rather than eccentric, Uncle Jack seemed contrived, self-indulgent and tedious to me, and I couldn’t figure out why his rather bizarre speech couldn’t have been reduced to a single paragraph. I was to soon find out the hymn speech was a harbinger of things to come. From that point on, the characters were often unusually wordy. Rather than talk, Jean Louise, Atticus, Henry and Uncle Jack would deliver long, drawn out and sometimes peculiar sermons to one another.
As many know by now, Jean Louise discovers her father is a racist. She learns that he, and her boyfriend Henry, are members of the local white citizens council dedicated to preserving segregation. This is presented as shocking news, and it is shocking to everyone familiar with To Kill A Mockingbird. But I don’t think it would have been much of a surprise if Go Set A Watchman had been published first. Atticus Finch is 72, and he has lived his life in this small southern town among an elite class. He’s a white man from a “fine old family.” Of course, he’d want to preserve the status quo. The status quo has been good to Atticus Finch, so it’s all well and good for him to go on about states’ rights, how odious government assistance is and how black people need to earn the right to vote.
Jean Louise idealized her father, so learning he strongly supports segregation and has such little regard for the plight of his black neighbors sickens her. She has to learn to accept that he’s human and that they will sometimes disagree or leave Maycomb never to return. That basic premise seems like a pretty good idea for a sequel, but it is all handled in a rather ham-handed way. By the time Jean Louise is working all of this out, the story has lost all subtlety and the longwinded rationalizations have set in.
Many will be hugely disappointed in Atticus Finch, but I imagine Jean Louise will lose some of her luster, too. She seemed so blissfully unaware of how the SCOTUS decision and the advent of Civil Rights was changing the south and shacking things up. Why wouldn’t she followed the news more closely? Why wouldn’t she have asked her friends and family back home more questions about what was happening? And she wants everyone to know that she didn’t like the SCOTUS decision either, and she’s firmly in favor of “states’ rights,” too.
Like so many Americans my age and younger, I first read Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird in high school. I read it again a few years later, and I’ve seen the classic film based on the novel several times. The book was published five years before I was born, and by the time I was introduced to it in the eleventh grade, it had become a major American classic. Everyone seemed to be aware of To Kill A Mockingbird. I remember Charlene referring to it on the TV series Designing Women, and I remember Mary Ann alluding to it in Tales of the City. As someone who has post traumatic stress disorder and social phobia, I relate to the character Boo Radley. So I was more than a little surprised and intrigued when I learned Harper Lee was going to publish a sequel and that this “new” novel had actually been written before To Kill A Mockingbird.
Now that I’ve read it, I’m of the opinion that Go Set A Watchman would have long been forgotten and Harper Lee would have been reduced to a literary footnote if this was her first and only book. She would have been remembered as Truman Capote’s friend who once tried her hand at novel writing. I’m glad her editor pushed her to write the story that caused Jean Louise to put her father on such a high pedestal back in the day. I think seeing Atticus Finch fall off that pedestal would be a fitting follow up. But if Lee wanted to share this story with us, I think the time to do it would have been back in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s or ’90s. She could have rewritten it then, made it a much stronger story.
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