Harper Lee (1926–2016)

Two days ago, I was standing in the bookstore, and I literally picked up and put down this book at least three times before I finally decided to purchase and read it. I was that nervous.

And, if I'm completely honest, I dove into this novel fully expecting to hate it.

Instead, I fell in love with Harper Lee all over again.

I've read a lot about the concerns that Lee didn't write it, or that she didn't want it published, or that it shouldn't have been published. But just a few sentences in, and show more I was swept up into the town of Maycomb all over again.

All the characters are here, but now they're grown, though we get some beautiful remembrances of them in their youth.

And then there's the point when Lee first mentions the events that are detailed in To Kill a Mockingbird and I remember thinking, okay, this is where she kills that gorgeous novel of my youth.

And in a way, she did, but mostly, she did not. No, instead, she added a whole different, and nuanced layer over it. It's a layer that tends to rough up the gloss of that earlier novel a bit, but when the story of Watchman kicks in, it's simply fascinating to watch it unfold and, at the end, without giving away any spoilers, I feel Lee ultimately gave us a better, more realistic, and yet still very hopeful ending to Jean Louise "Scout" Finch moving into adulthood.

Along the way, Lee treats the reader to some absolutely beautiful, sometimes haunting writing. This novel is eminently quotable, but the line that I think resonated with me the most was the one I found in the last few pages. "The time your friends need you is when they're wrong, Jean Louise. They don't need you when they're right."

In the end, instead of being profoundly disappointed by this novel as I expected to be, I find myself profoundly disappointed that we will never get another story from Harper Lee. show less

I'm going to preface this with a disclaimer: it's been years since I last read To Kill a Mockingbird. Probably was some time in high school, so at least eight years (since I did almost no free reading in junior or senior year).

The most important thing to know is that, yes, it's a sequel. Somehow that fact slipped by me--or maybe it was reading a New York Times article that mentioned Harper Lee's original TKAM manuscript that muddled me. It's hard to imagine the crucial plot twist making much show more sense if you haven't read TKAM, but I do think there's just enough exposition about past events to let someone who only roughly knows TKAM's second act to enjoy this book. Anywho, now that the obvious is done...

I am torn in two directions.

On the one hand, I really liked the style of it--I enjoyed the writing, the easy transitions from casual Maycomb history to wry external commentary to close personal experiences to first person thoughts. No real demarcation of those divisions. The abrupt switches to first person would normally drive me nuts, but I adapted so quickly that I barely noticed.

The humor was spot-on. I'm a complete fool for the so-softly-sarcastic-you-might-think-it's-serious style of writing. The absolute highlights, for me, were the flashbacks to Scout's childhood, though that's probably my love of TKAM showing. They were hilarious and well-placed to reflect on the present action only when you thought about it--otherwise, they could easily seem like random asides.

One odd note: I have a strong memory of there being two "parts" in TKAM. I don't know if this is accurate, but it's something I've remembered/thought I remembered for years...which makes it interesting that GSAW is divided into at least a half dozen "parts". Admittedly, I didn't pay enough attention to each part's beginning to draw conclusions about their importance, though the endings did seem to consistently land with a punch.

I honestly have no memory of Henry Clinton (sort of explained by the fact that he worked all summer) or Uncle Jack, and very little of Aunt Alexandra from TKAM. Nevertheless, I loved how these characters were presented and built in the book.

Now the plot, on the other hand...

First of all, no matter how much space I take up explaining the "bad", this didn't anywhere near keep me from enjoying the romp through an old familiar world. So bear that in mind!

Let's start with the fact that the major "raison d'etre", the key problem, doesn't show up until halfway through the book. Odd, but not bad, especially considering how much I loved the explorations and elaborations of the Maycomb we met in TKAM.

Next, we have heavy-handedness. Jean Louise's/Scout's life changing discovery about Atticus happens not only in the same building, but in the same exact place that she sat to watch him defend Tom in TKAM. The "life lessons" are laid on pretty thick at the end, in large part because they take place in a conversation--fortunately the setup and strong personalities help take some of the sting out of the lecture.

(I'm putting a spoiler tag here, but if you've been reading reviews, you probably know the major plot twist.)

I'm sure you expect my chief complaint to be the retconing of Atticus's character. It's not. In fact, I don't even consider it reconing. I would not find it at all unbelievable that an older white man of considerable privilege in the 1950s South would be racist. I don't even find it unbelievable that this particular character is racist--it's explained in a way that makes sense (though obviously I'll want to reread TKAM to confirm whether it's accurate).

Let me put it this way: I used my Ravenclaw bookmark for this book on a whim and I found it utterly appropriate. The way I see it, in raw thought after a first reading, Atticus is the kind of Ravenclaw that could go bad if JKR wrote Harry Potter today: so focused on the higher-order intellectual ideals of the Constitution and the immediate overwhelming odds the "Negros" face that he neglects the humanity involved. People are so much more complicated than ideas, especially when you try to lump them into as huge a group as a "race". To steal a comparison from an author I'm signing up, Atticus and many Ravenclaws are Apollonian, pursuing order and reason, while a group of people is by its very nature Dionysian: chaotic, changeable, difficult to define. A good piece of art, says Nietzsche, is a balance of the two, and the idea can be applied to a character.

Which brings me to my biggest beef with the book: Jean Louise's "color blindness". I loved her character to bits (despite a few feminist critiques like her lack of life outside Maycomb), but this was a major speed bump. For those of you who don't yet know, colorblindness doesn't exist. It's an ideal invented by privileged white people (most of them probably kind and good-intentioned) that is so far from being attainable in our society right now that it's frankly insulting to insist that you've reached it.

The attitudes that go into racism are so pervasive and pernicious that there's just no way to avoid them. Even if we take it as fact that Jean Louise/Scout ignored everything said about black people by anyone accept her father, his racism still would have bled through to her. Yes, he was equally kind to everyone--but you can be equally kind without behaving equally. The difference would have been subtle, but it would have been enough for an (apparently selectively) impressionable young child: the difference between the way Atticus handled the case of a "white trash" person who he believed had the potential to better themselves in their lifetime and a black person who he believed could only encounter a ceiling, regardless of circumstance, is subtle but real. Any oppressed group can tell you this--even if you don't have your token black friend, you undoubtedly know at least one woman. Heck, just look at the differences in the way Atticus treats Jean Louise and Henry!

Jean Louise is, herself, as much of an Apollonian as her father. Lee goes so far to make this point that she strays right past the suspension of disbelief just so Uncle Jack can point out all the ways that Jean Louise is also as much of a bigot as her father. Which, incidentally, makes me a bigot as well. So be it. My bigotry, if spread, could help save lives.

That's what it all comes down to: This is not a book for our time. The cover flap states that it was written in the 50s, and the book's message is something you wouldn't be surprised to find in a time capsule. But today it's just too raw. We watch the ongoing genocide of black Americans on the news. So what if Atticus himself would never pull the trigger? So what if most people wouldn't? The church shooting in Charleston showed us exactly what that insidiously "innocent" brand of bigotry sows: if no one protests the casual and/or deliberate dehumanization of a large portion of the population, how can you be surprised when one person decides it's okay to treat that group worse than most people would treat animals?

Jean Louise's colorblindness is impossible. Her loud and public rage against the casual acceptance of racism is not. If only Lee's message wasn't one of leveling extremes into acceptance--if only the revelation of Atticus's racism was not so overdone, Jean Louise's wake-up was her realization that she's not colorblind, the moral was not accepting inequality but balancing true equality between Apollonian and Dionysian ideals--this might have been a powerful book for our time. Instead, it's a well-written and engaging sequel that depends on its readers' Atticus- and Jean Louise-like passivity and desire for a neatly ordered ending to deliver its lukewarm moral.
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The time your friends need you is when they’re wrong.

In 1957 Tay Hohoff, literary editor, judged this book to be unfit for publication as it was "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel". If the book in any way resembled what was published last year she couldn't have been more wrong. There are no superfluous lines or chapters or stories in this book, and every separate anecdote connects directly with what came before and after it, as well as everything else in the book. It show more is hilariously funny in places. It is beautiful. It is poignant. It is eye-opening.

I am glad they didn't rush to publish it, because it means we got To Kill a Mocking Bird out of it, but it was a crime against the entire world that they discouraged her from finishing it and publishing it as Go Set a Watchman first day. It is an amazing book in its own right, just because something isn't best-seller material doesn't mean it isn't fit to be published. It would have had exactly the type of small but far-reaching success that she wanted.

The book needed a couple of little things, the parts that repeat or contradict To Kill a Mocking Bird needed to be fixed, and Jean Louise's views on race could be more well developed. For example, racism, the central theme in To Kill a Mocking bird, ends up being almost a McGuffin here. She concedes points she does not need to concede. The fact that some of these things are destroyed later does not stop people who were too angry to read on quoting them out of context and using them to attack the book.
So it's unfinished. But unfinished? Unfinished like The Trial is "unfinished".


I learned a lot from this book. Most importantly I learned the dictionary definition of bigot, that I am a turnip-sized one. We are living in a time when people passionately ignore opposing views, and assume anyone with them is pure evil. Few are willing to quietly and calmly, over time, help their friends to see the truth.

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People are upset with this book because they can't deal with the cognitive dissonance that Jean Louise has to deal with. Good people can be wrong and have loathsome views, including you, and me, and Jean Louise and Atticus. If you can't accept that you are exactly who this book was trying to reach. If you find it difficult to deal with it, and you want help, this book gives you some tools to deal with it.

Jean Louise's own ambivalence is tearing her apart. She loves Henry, but her family say he is of a lower order of human being. She could live with that, but could she live in Maycomb, surrounded by people who don't think like her? A lot of the vitriol spewed at this book comes from people interpreting the ending as Jean Louise acquiescing and deciding that prejudice isn't so bad after all. There is nothing to suggest this. Her uncle does not say she needs to come round to everyone else's way of thinking, he says she isn't alone and the people who think like her need allies.

Scout, all grown up, loses her real mother (Cal) and her father (Atticus) to racism, and she is shown the way to get them back.


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A true American classic, Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD continues to be read and discussed by thoughtful readers of all ages nearly sixty years after she wrote it. Recently I began reading a related book called SCOUT, ATTICUS & BOO, a collection of reflections on both the book and the (equally classic) film. The pieces in that book were so filled with praise and comments about the book and its characters that I put that book down and went back to Lee's original text. I found that, given show more today's highly charged political atmosphere, TKaM, with its intense and dramatic treatment of racial hatred and references to the KKK, is just as relevant right now as it was when it was first published. I have seen the film version perhaps a half dozen times over the last fifty years, but I had not read the book since the 60s. It still works. I know it's a cliché, but this book will make you laugh and cry. Lee's subtle sense of humor shines through this very serious work repeatedly, and the deeply affecting relationships in the Finch family - Atticus, Scout and Jem - will make you weep. This is a beautiful book. A classic? Absolutely. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less