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If you’ve never read To Kill a Mockingbird you should, even if you’ve seen the movie. If you have read it, then I think you should be curious about Go Set a Watchman. I first read To Kill a Mockingbird as a high school sophomore. I still have the paperback copy I read it from then. I don’t remember how many times I’d read it, maybe four. But it had been quite a while since the last time. So after I read Go Set a Watchman, I read it again.
Let’s be honest there is more than one elephant in the room when discussing Go Set a Watchman. The commonly expressed feeling back in the 1960s when Mockingbird was new and extremely popular was that it was largely autobiographical, that Harper Lee had used up her family stories, and that chances were that she would never write another novel. Yet Mockingbird was so powerful that virtually everyone who enjoyed it really wished she would write another. One can imagine that after 50+ years of hearing people ask about that very thing, she was thoroughly tired of it, especially knowing she had kept another novel to herself all those years. Lee is well up in years now, and whether by design or by persuasion, she decided to allow Watchman to be published. Make no mistake about it, Watchman is a 60 year old novel, and, importantly, a novel Lee decided to put aside. The problem with that is that Lee probably is no longer in a position to do a major revision of a novel, and Watchman has needed it for all those years. What’s wrong? If you’ve read other reviews you may already know. Whole pages of anecdotes about secondary figures in both novels are either very similarly worded or absolutely identical. You can’t plagiarize from yourself. If you never intend to have a story published no one need ever know you lifted a good passage from it and reworked it into something else. But if one story gets published, you either have to rework the second one before it’s published or let everyone see what you did. I suspect that by the time Harper Collins, the publisher of Watchman, realized the passages were there, the contracts were already signed and there was little anyone could do about them. They aren’t exactly the center of focus of either book, and they don’t take up a big chunk of the books. But if you read the books in quick succession like I did this week, you will absolutely know they are there and find them a little annoying. It isn’t just older people who tell the same stories the same way over and over. But no matter the age of the storyteller if you hear the same stories too often in a short period of time they do get dull.
Beyond that problem of reuse of anecdotes, a major event in Mockingbird is mentioned in passing in Watchman with a completely different outcome. It would have been a trivial change all these years later to make the account in Watchman agree with what happened in Mockingbird. But for whatever reason, the change was not made. So the worlds of Mockingbird and Watchman which so strongly seem to be the same are not exactly the same!
Let’s be clear, there is nothing wrong with Watchman as a novel, It is quite a good one. It’s just that in our real world in which Mockingbird is a part of cultural history, it certainly would have been nice if Harper Lee had slicked up Watchman 20 or 30 years ago and sent it to a publisher. Could she have published Watchman before Mockingbird, 60 years ago? I don’t think so. The background story was too volatile for 1950s readers North or South and frankly in tone it reads as if it were written 10 years later in the rebellious 1960s. Published in the form it is in now, say, in the late 1960s it would probably have caused a very unpleasant uproar against Lee. You can hardly blame her for not bringing it out of storage then. Does Mockingbird in any way diminish Watchman? Absolutely not. It makes Watchman a far more powerful novel than it would be in isolation, because we think we know Jean Louise and Atticus so well.
If you’ve heard anything about Watchman you probably know the background is race relations in the South. But, some have said that’s what the book is about. It absolutely is not, no more than War and Peace is about Napoleon or Crime and Punishment is about police. Watchman is about change on several levels, especially the changing relationship between parents and their maturing children, and our attitude about our early heroes as we learn more about them and about ourselves.
Mockingbird begins in 1933 when Scout is almost six. Watchman is set when Jean Louise is 26, making the date about 1953. Watchman centers more on Jean Louise’s family. All of the important family characters in Mockingbird at least make an appearance in an active way. We learn more about the Finches and their place in Maycomb than we learned in Mockingbird. In Mockingbird the whole idea of the Finches’ position is something of a running joke on Scout’s Aunt Alexandra. Alexandra’s haughty attitudes are still the butt of jokes in Watchman. However we see that Alexandra isn’t a Southern U.S. version of Hyacinth Bucket. There is nothing imaginary or unearned about the Finches’ position in Maycomb society. Alexandra’s problem isn’t her tendency to put on airs, but the fact she can’t see what the whole town knows: In a town with a lot of quirky and, to be blunt, odd-ball people, the Finch Family has its fair share. She especially can’t understand that Jean Louise has been one of the town oddities since she was a little child and isn’t going to change.
In the story Jean Louise dresses nicely to go to church on Sunday and her aunt asks her where her hat is. In 1953, it was not just in the South that Protestant ladies of all ages were supposed to wear a hat to church. Jean Louise replies to her aunt:
Aunty, you know good and well if I walked in church today with a hat on they’d think somebody was dead.
Jean Louise’s individuality and inherent position in society, become as important as anything in the story.
The one very important new character in Watchman is Henry Clinton, Jean Louise’s constant, ardent suitor. Atticus likes the young man and has done everything he can toward helping him professionally. Alexandra can’t stand what he represents in her mind:
We Finches do not marry the children of rednecked white trash,...
Jean Louise isn’t concerned with such nonsense, but she can’t begin to make up her own mind whether she wants to marry him or not.
Jean Louise learning and maturing is also a theme. At one point in a flash back, Scout through no fault of her own is mortified and scared to death purely from lack of knowledge. The family’s black cook, Calpurnia sums up the situation:
With all your book learnin’, you are the most ignorant child I ever did see.
The action in the story revolves around Jean Louise finding her father involved in a situation that for her is totally abhorrent. After church she finds racist literature in Atticus’ house.
...she took the pamphlet by one of its corners, held it like she would hold a dead rat by the tail,...
That afternoon Atticus, Henry and the most of the other men of the town meet at the courthouse to listen to a rabid, vocal proponent of segregation.
The inevitable collision between daughter and father is the main climax of the story. After that soon comes a scene that I found a little difficult to absorb and justify before I reread To Kill a Mockingbird. Others may well dislike this scene altogether. Once past this rough spot, the ending is fine.
Mockingbird is told in first person by an adult woman of undetermined age looking back trying to explain a boisterous and adventure-filled childhood from the point of view of a child. Watchman is told in the third person from the point of a very intelligent, literate and independent young woman trying to make sense of her life, both past and future, and to make sense of the small isolated town she grew up in.
Ignoring the problem of repeated anecdotes Go Set a Watchman is an excellent novel. Given that even Jean Louise (a woman of 1953, after all) is not 100% in line with today’s political correctness and that Atticus is shown not to be perfect, I don’t expect Watchman to pile up awards the way that To Kill a Mockingbird did. Mockingbird certainly has more emotional impact and has more action. Watchman is not a continuation. It is its own story. Frankly, Watchman is in most ways the better constructed novel. Where those anecdotes in Mockingbird are perfectly welcome digressions, they are a necessary part of the structure of Watchman. My only other quibble about the novel, is that it has as a few too many literary references, allusions and quotes from both poetry and plain doggerel. I don’t see many modern readers being able to appreciate all of it. Otherwise the style of Go Set a Watchman was pleasant and the prose less convoluted than that of Mockingbird. Scholars of Harper Lee have a great new toy to play with. With the warnings above, I’d recommend that anyone who enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird read Go Set a Watchman, and I’d recommend anyone who hasn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird to strongly consider reading both.
Let’s be honest there is more than one elephant in the room when discussing Go Set a Watchman. The commonly expressed feeling back in the 1960s when Mockingbird was new and extremely popular was that it was largely autobiographical, that Harper Lee had used up her family stories, and that chances were that she would never write another novel. Yet Mockingbird was so powerful that virtually everyone who enjoyed it really wished she would write another. One can imagine that after 50+ years of hearing people ask about that very thing, she was thoroughly tired of it, especially knowing she had kept another novel to herself all those years. Lee is well up in years now, and whether by design or by persuasion, she decided to allow Watchman to be published. Make no mistake about it, Watchman is a 60 year old novel, and, importantly, a novel Lee decided to put aside. The problem with that is that Lee probably is no longer in a position to do a major revision of a novel, and Watchman has needed it for all those years. What’s wrong? If you’ve read other reviews you may already know. Whole pages of anecdotes about secondary figures in both novels are either very similarly worded or absolutely identical. You can’t plagiarize from yourself. If you never intend to have a story published no one need ever know you lifted a good passage from it and reworked it into something else. But if one story gets published, you either have to rework the second one before it’s published or let everyone see what you did. I suspect that by the time Harper Collins, the publisher of Watchman, realized the passages were there, the contracts were already signed and there was little anyone could do about them. They aren’t exactly the center of focus of either book, and they don’t take up a big chunk of the books. But if you read the books in quick succession like I did this week, you will absolutely know they are there and find them a little annoying. It isn’t just older people who tell the same stories the same way over and over. But no matter the age of the storyteller if you hear the same stories too often in a short period of time they do get dull.
Beyond that problem of reuse of anecdotes, a major event in Mockingbird is mentioned in passing in Watchman with a completely different outcome. It would have been a trivial change all these years later to make the account in Watchman agree with what happened in Mockingbird. But for whatever reason, the change was not made. So the worlds of Mockingbird and Watchman which so strongly seem to be the same are not exactly the same!
Let’s be clear, there is nothing wrong with Watchman as a novel, It is quite a good one. It’s just that in our real world in which Mockingbird is a part of cultural history, it certainly would have been nice if Harper Lee had slicked up Watchman 20 or 30 years ago and sent it to a publisher. Could she have published Watchman before Mockingbird, 60 years ago? I don’t think so. The background story was too volatile for 1950s readers North or South and frankly in tone it reads as if it were written 10 years later in the rebellious 1960s. Published in the form it is in now, say, in the late 1960s it would probably have caused a very unpleasant uproar against Lee. You can hardly blame her for not bringing it out of storage then. Does Mockingbird in any way diminish Watchman? Absolutely not. It makes Watchman a far more powerful novel than it would be in isolation, because we think we know Jean Louise and Atticus so well.
If you’ve heard anything about Watchman you probably know the background is race relations in the South. But, some have said that’s what the book is about. It absolutely is not, no more than War and Peace is about Napoleon or Crime and Punishment is about police. Watchman is about change on several levels, especially the changing relationship between parents and their maturing children, and our attitude about our early heroes as we learn more about them and about ourselves.
Mockingbird begins in 1933 when Scout is almost six. Watchman is set when Jean Louise is 26, making the date about 1953. Watchman centers more on Jean Louise’s family. All of the important family characters in Mockingbird at least make an appearance in an active way. We learn more about the Finches and their place in Maycomb than we learned in Mockingbird. In Mockingbird the whole idea of the Finches’ position is something of a running joke on Scout’s Aunt Alexandra. Alexandra’s haughty attitudes are still the butt of jokes in Watchman. However we see that Alexandra isn’t a Southern U.S. version of Hyacinth Bucket. There is nothing imaginary or unearned about the Finches’ position in Maycomb society. Alexandra’s problem isn’t her tendency to put on airs, but the fact she can’t see what the whole town knows: In a town with a lot of quirky and, to be blunt, odd-ball people, the Finch Family has its fair share. She especially can’t understand that Jean Louise has been one of the town oddities since she was a little child and isn’t going to change.
In the story Jean Louise dresses nicely to go to church on Sunday and her aunt asks her where her hat is. In 1953, it was not just in the South that Protestant ladies of all ages were supposed to wear a hat to church. Jean Louise replies to her aunt:
Aunty, you know good and well if I walked in church today with a hat on they’d think somebody was dead.
Jean Louise’s individuality and inherent position in society, become as important as anything in the story.
The one very important new character in Watchman is Henry Clinton, Jean Louise’s constant, ardent suitor. Atticus likes the young man and has done everything he can toward helping him professionally. Alexandra can’t stand what he represents in her mind:
We Finches do not marry the children of rednecked white trash,...
Jean Louise isn’t concerned with such nonsense, but she can’t begin to make up her own mind whether she wants to marry him or not.
Jean Louise learning and maturing is also a theme. At one point in a flash back, Scout through no fault of her own is mortified and scared to death purely from lack of knowledge. The family’s black cook, Calpurnia sums up the situation:
With all your book learnin’, you are the most ignorant child I ever did see.
The action in the story revolves around Jean Louise finding her father involved in a situation that for her is totally abhorrent. After church she finds racist literature in Atticus’ house.
...she took the pamphlet by one of its corners, held it like she would hold a dead rat by the tail,...
That afternoon Atticus, Henry and the most of the other men of the town meet at the courthouse to listen to a rabid, vocal proponent of segregation.
The inevitable collision between daughter and father is the main climax of the story. After that soon comes a scene that I found a little difficult to absorb and justify before I reread To Kill a Mockingbird. Others may well dislike this scene altogether. Once past this rough spot, the ending is fine.
Mockingbird is told in first person by an adult woman of undetermined age looking back trying to explain a boisterous and adventure-filled childhood from the point of view of a child. Watchman is told in the third person from the point of a very intelligent, literate and independent young woman trying to make sense of her life, both past and future, and to make sense of the small isolated town she grew up in.
Ignoring the problem of repeated anecdotes Go Set a Watchman is an excellent novel. Given that even Jean Louise (a woman of 1953, after all) is not 100% in line with today’s political correctness and that Atticus is shown not to be perfect, I don’t expect Watchman to pile up awards the way that To Kill a Mockingbird did. Mockingbird certainly has more emotional impact and has more action. Watchman is not a continuation. It is its own story. Frankly, Watchman is in most ways the better constructed novel. Where those anecdotes in Mockingbird are perfectly welcome digressions, they are a necessary part of the structure of Watchman. My only other quibble about the novel, is that it has as a few too many literary references, allusions and quotes from both poetry and plain doggerel. I don’t see many modern readers being able to appreciate all of it. Otherwise the style of Go Set a Watchman was pleasant and the prose less convoluted than that of Mockingbird. Scholars of Harper Lee have a great new toy to play with. With the warnings above, I’d recommend that anyone who enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird read Go Set a Watchman, and I’d recommend anyone who hasn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird to strongly consider reading both.
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It's also certainly possibly that this book is way too close to home for me to read objectively.
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Everyone's reaction has been very different. Some reviewers hated the book, and I do mean hated it. I think the Washington Post's reviewer blasted it. While the NY Times reviewer actually seemed to like it a great deal. On live journal, three people on my flist have reviewed it, including yourself. Selenak (Germany) had a rather interesting perspective - she didn't adore To Kill a Mockingbird and didn't understand why people in the US and UK adored it. So she went into Watchman, thinking she might enjoy it more - because it felt more real to her. She did like it, but understood why it wasn't published and why the writer was asked to rewrite it. Her other comments were that the book was burdened by lengthy speeches and a shifting point of view that was distracting. But you could tell what an excellent wordsmith Harper Lee truly was.
And you've read mamaculuna's which reminded me a bit of the Washington Post and New Yorker' reviews.
I've been flirting with the book. I remember loving Mockingbird, which I've read about twice, last time was 20 years ago. And I've seen the movie several times. (A friend of mine hasn't seen the film or read the book.)
Can't say I blame Harper Lee for not publishing another book. (I don't think that means she didn't write or hadn't written one. Writing is easier than publishing. And the media, publishing world, and fans drove her insane - she couldn't stand the limelight, unlike her friend Truman Capote who loved it. In some ways she was more similar to JD Salinger, who wrote a great deal - but he hid it away from prying eyes until 20 years after his death. Having seen how people deal with books and art - I don't blame them. It's ironic in a way, their fans behavior resulted in them hesitating to publish - because unfortunately fans want you to write for them. To write a book that interests them, caters to them. But that's not always what is inside you -- that's not the story you need to tell. It's a problem I see with a lot of writers...I sort of wish we could all just publish books, put them out there, show people what they are about, let them read them. And that's it in regards to interaction.]
From everything I've read about Go Set The Watchman - I think it may in some respects be truer to Harper Lee's own experience, her own background. While To Kill may be how she wishes to remember it. Which makes me think I should read it.
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I haven't pretended that Watchman is as good as it could have been. But then nothing is. Once a work is out in the world I always try to look at it from its own merits, not how it got to be published, whether the author was popular, drunk all the time or a complete nincompoop in real life; or anything else besides the work itself. That said...
From everything I've read about Go Set The Watchman - I think it may in some respects be truer to Harper Lee's own experience, her own background.
I think that is a big reason why I like the book. I could have done a better job of demonstrating why I think it is a well written book. But then I'd need to go deeper into scholar mode, which most people wouldn't care to read. ;o)
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Or using narrative style in an interesting manner to convey an idea?
Or is paint-by-numbers writing by committee? (See James Patterson and Nicholas Sparks.) Or an over-done and somewhat tired trope, with repetitive phrasing, but occasional moments of ingenuity, which apark of unintentional satire? (See 50 Shades of Grey).
I admittedly think about 98% of the best-sellers are pulp, in every sense of the word. Although fun can be had by reading them - you don't want to analyze them or write a paper on them. Considering 98% of the people who read, don't ever want to analyze or write papers or critique what they read - this may explain why pulp fiction sells so well.
I had two people that I sent my book to - who advised me to turn it into pulp fiction. "Make it a nice murder mystery, which doesn't require thought. Thank you, kindly. Goodbye."
Harper Lee had somewhat the same problem - "make it a nice coming of age tale that we can sell to our readership, thank you kindly.
Goodbye."
But it would have been nice, when they came calling again - that they'd have given it a decent line edit. All writers need line editing. Line editing wasn't what she got the first go around - that's not editing, that's changing the whole structure of the story.
I read selenak's review, and she sort said some of the same things that you did - that while it wasn't well done or that it definitely was flawed, she was glad it was published, and it was well written.
The writer was a definite wordsmith.
I think most of the negative reviews come from an emotional place - the writer didn't give that particular reader what they wanted. It triggered them in some way. It hurt how they viewed the original. Which really is more about the reader...than Harper Lee's book.