A review by whaydengilbert
Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

challenging emotional funny reflective

3.25

“All men are created evil.”

There are numerous controversies surrounding the release of this book: was Harper Lee taken advantage of? Is this a true sequel, or just a repurposed first draft of the original? If it’s the latter, why was it released with no context, and worse, misleading marketing? But the controversy that has interested me the most since the announcement is the that of the “character assassination” of a certain iconic literary hero. I must admit I’ve been insanely curious about the book itself and figured now, after having finally reread the original classic, was as good a time as any to finally find out what all the hubbub was about.

 

One of the nagging questions at the front of my mind while reading this was—what *did* the original book look like? What was the story? What was added and omitted during the editing process? There might be well-documented answers to these questions, but I’m unaware of them. Where did all of this fit around the narrative we know from To Kill a Mockingbird, and how much of that was added after the decision to focus solely on the narrator’s childhood? That first book as it exists now is such a beautiful work of hero worship. If the original draft was more of an even split, half-Scout and half-Jean Louise, was the original intention to provide Scout the hero she needed as a child, and then to bring him down to earth so that she could grow? What WAS the book to be? What would the book and Harper Lee’s legacies have been if this idea was pursued?

However they went about the transformation of the book, To Kill a Mockingbird is like pure liberal fantasy; the educated white man protecting the oppressed from the poor, uneducated, violent, disgusting, racist, inbred white-trash who, at best, know not what they do, and at worst…are Bob Ewell. I’ve always found it funny that a book that’s all about empathy, whose entire ethos is a plea to “walk around in someone else’s skin to understand them,” also contains one of the most irredeemable, vile villains in all literature. And opposing him is Atticus Finch, the ultimate Lib-Superman. And Atticus is awesome. There’s a reason everyone loves him. On the reread, the last chapter left me tearing up with its closing lines, letting you know your big, strong, liberal dad will never leave your side. But as I said before, I was fascinated with the idea of the big revelation of this book. Is Atticus a secret racist, or has he become one as he grew older? Scout’s disillusionment is the one we all have when we grow old enough to realize our parents are not just “Mother and Father”, but are also people. Complicated human beings who can be selfish and flawed and, yes, contradictory. And it came make the lessons they taught you early in life feel hollow in retrospect. If you knew *this* was of thinking was right, why didn’t you follow your own advice? And the answer to that is they always wanted us to be better than them.

Some of the most compelling stuff in the latter parts of Mockingbird are Scout grappling with her own unquestioned prejudices and racism, and now we see her disillusionment with what has become of the people closest to her. This book seems to beg the question, ‘is racism a curse doomed to swallow southerners whole?’ Is it something inescapable? The first book has a recurring theme that people are their last name. Their ways are their ways, and it is what it is.

In the end, though, it becomes pretty clear that this was not meant to be a book on its own. There’s a lot of philosophizing, and very little story. Around the halfway point, there is mention of a new court case: Calpurnia’s grandson has killed a white man in an auto accident, and Atticus takes it. The reader gets the idea that there might be a plot that begins to mirror that of the original, but no. It never gets that far. We instead jump back in time to a few memories of Scout as a teenager, and then follow Jean Louise over the course of a few days. The novel climaxes with Jean Louise confronting Atticus, and after the horrific conversation she has with her father about her discovery of him, the grand finale is a long, muddled conversation of ideas with her uncle that seems to resolve things. I’m just not sure how that happened. The last two chapters left me a tad confused. Is the book letting Atticus off the hook, saying he just took the racist side of the argument just to make his daughter destroy him as an idol in her life? Or is the idea a more complicated one? This ambiguity is my favorite part of the ending of the novel, as I’ll be thinking about it for a long time, grappling with it like Scout, but I’m not sure Uncle Jack’s lecture cleared much up for me.

I’m giving this a 3 star because it doesn’t stand on its own as a novel, but it was a fascinating read. I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time.