Now that Harper Lee’s book has been out for almost a full week, I think it’s safe to talk about it openly.
I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
Those of us who read To Kill a Mockingbird growing up, and/or watched the movie, all loved Atticus. He was the representation of everything that was good and right and just in the world.
In fact, let’s face it, he was too good to be true.
No one has that much patience. No one is that consistently level-headed. And no one running their own business is “never too busy for his children”.
But To Kill a Mockingbird was told from the perspective of Scout as a young child. All young children worship their parents and think they can do no wrong. But I would have hoped that, by age 26, most children have realized their parents are only human.
I’m not trying to defend Atticus, and I don’t think Lee was either. Racism and segregation are bad. Period. But if we, like Scout, are going to accept that Atticus is a flawed human, we have to take the good with the bad.
Atticus’s views on segregation don’t cancel out all the good he’s done, just like all the good he’s done doesn’t cancel out the fact that he stands on the wrong side of history when it comes to segregation. He is both good and bad. Just like the rest of us.
Having recently re-read To Kill a Mockingbird in preparation for the new book, I realized it’s not really about racism. That certainly plays a large part, but ultimately it’s about empathy. The beginning and end of the book don’t mention the trial. They both mention Boo Radley, a local man no one has seen in years, so of course all the neighbors make wild speculations about what he’s like and whether he’s still alive. Throughout the course of the book, culminating in Boo’s daring rescue at the end, Scout learns not to judge people. Atticus helps her see that Boo is just another person with a life of his own. Just because his life is different from hers doesn’t make him some sort of monster.
In a way, I think Atticus taught Scout the same lesson in the “sequel”. He has views that are different from hers, but that doesn’t make him some sort of monster. Even after she rants and screams at him, he accepts her and tells her he’s proud of her. It doesn’t matter to him that she has grown up with beliefs opposed to his own, because he doesn’t see it has some sort of black-and-white (no pun intended) all-encompassing moral view. What matters is she is his daughter and she has the ability to stand up for herself and what she believes in.
If nothing else, this book teaches us that being polite to black people is not the same as not being a racist.
On the other hand, I thought Uncle Jack’s speeches took it too far. First, he said the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights. Which is just wrong. Then he went off on some tangent about how Scout has always linked her conscience to her father’s. Well, yeah, that’s what kids do. They learn right and wrong from their parents. But he makes it sound like some great character flaw that needed to be remedied, and I don’t think that was the case.
I also could have done without him hitting her because I thought that was completely uncalled for.
As far as the writing of the book, it’s pretty clear this didn’t get much editing. It’s still pretty well-written and overall I liked it, but it had a tendency to switch between the present and the past without any warning. It also switches from third person to first person POV, which I think was supposed to be Scout’s thoughts, but that was never made clear, which resulted in confusing prose that took a while to get through. Uncle Jack’s speeches probably would have disappeared or at least been pared down by a good editor. It’s obvious the publisher went “We have a ‘new’ Harper Lee book! We don’t need to invest any resources in editing!” From a business standpoint, I’m not surprised, but I still wish they had at least had someone look it over.
I do wonder if this book will have any effect on the millions of students who are made to read To Kill a Mockingbird every year. Will they be made to read Go Set a Watchman next? Will they no longer read To Kill a Mockingbird? Or will everything stay the same?
What about you guys? Did anyone feel the same way when reading the book, or totally different?
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“As far as the writing of the book, it’s pretty clear this didn’t get much editing.”
Well, it did, it was edited into To Kill A Mockingbird. That’s the real issue with this book, it’s the first draft of what became TKAM – something we, as readers, weren’t ever meant to see. Editing Go Set A Watchmen would be redundant because it was already done.
Not quite. There are different kinds of editing. Although it’s true Lee wrote this book first and the comments from the editor led to Lee writing “To Kill A Mockingbird”, I don’t think it’s fair to call “Go Set A Watchman” a “first draft” of “To Kill A Mockingbird” because the story is completely different. You can bet the first draft of the manuscript that contained the story of “To Kill A Mockingbird” looked very different from the book we all read. Once Lee had decided to focus on young Scout’s story, the book had to go through copyediting and then proofreading.
Even with a mentally incapacitated author, the publishers should have assigned “Go Set A Watchman” to a copyeditor, but it doesn’t look like they bothered to do that much.