Book #90: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

After my effusive response to my last reading of To Kill a Mockingbird, I was not expecting Go Set a Watchman to live up to that book. And, long story short, it did not. And not just because the storyline is about how Scout discovers that Atticus actually has some bigoted ideas about race, which totally destroys her sense of the world--and ours, as readers, who have held Atticus Finch up as a bastion of equality and justice for the last fifty years. I of course was a little sad about that part of it, but that wasn't the worst of it, for sure--and I think if it had been done well, that could have been an interesting story about reconciling your childhood ideals with messy reality (for Scout and for us). However, this book was definitely missing the charm and style of TKAM, the overwhelming feeling of Maycomb that you get while reading that book, and the striking personality of Scout as we get the story from her perspective. But it's hard to be offended by Lee's problems as a writer in this book, because it seems pretty clear (to most people, anyway) that she probably had no intention of this book ever being published, that this was an unfinished manuscript that she wrote prior to the extensive revisions she did to get to TKAM. (Harper Lee was 89 when it was published, living in an assisted living center, apparently not in a sound mind, and her protective sister had just died two months prior to the publishers' announcement of "finding" a manuscript. It all seems pretty fishy to me.)

The major problem with this book is that it is unfinished and unpolished; many chapters are kind of uninteresting and the end of the book is filled with whole chapters of Scout raging about race politics at anyone who will listen for pages on end, which is dull and annoying, even if we as modern readers agree wholeheartedly with her. There are some fantastic scenes, though, and most of them are the flashbacks to Scout's childhood and are therefore most similar to TKAM--which is why it's easy to imagine that the editors may have pushed her to develop those more and helped her get to the book she ended up with. It's hard to say if this really does feel like a first draft of TKAM though--some characters are barely introduced and it's hard to imagine that we would care about them if we hadn't read TKAM first, so it feels more like a true sequel than the first reading of it. I totally get what sort of debate Lee was trying to start with this book, and I think it was really an interesting idea and that the whole topic of race relations in the south in the 60s was timely and important, but it felt like she was hammering it into our brains. Telling us, not showing us, like she did in TKAM in the end.

All in all, I'm glad to have finally read it, but glad that I didn't actually pay for it and buy into the dumb publishing house's scam (which I am convinced it was). And other than the few flashback scenes adding to my enjoyment of the characters, I don't think I will think too much about this book changing my view of the original.