Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee's sequel/prequel to To Catch a Mockingbird, is probably the most anticipated release of the year, if not longer. So much has already been written about it - Say it ain't so: Atticus Finch, a racist!? - that it's difficult to know how to begin.

But first, a summary: sometime circa 1954, 26-year-old Jean Louise "Scout" Finch returns home to Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her ill and aging father, Atticus. (Jem, we learn, has died suddenly of a heart condition two years earlier.) The visit, and Jean Louise's very identity, are thrown into turmoil by the revelation that her esteemed father is a member of the citizen's council, a less-than-august body with the goal of reversing the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. Jean Louise, now a wise New Yorker, is unable to accept the explanation she is given for her father's participation, chiefly that not to belong would jeopardize his standing and work within the community.

My thoughts: People are way to overwrought about this. I didn't come away with the impression that Atticus was a raging racist, unlike many of his time and place. I did come away with the impression that he was sick and old and somewhat resistant to change, but by no means radically so.

In many ways, I was glad of the controversy, as it kept me reading, searching for the "smoking gun" when I might otherwise have given up: Go Set a Watchman is mediocre at best. The character's feel half-developed, the plot seesaws between Jean Louise's present visit and various, somewhat random, memories of her childhood, and perhaps most irritating, the first person and third person, sometimes within the same paragraph and almost always without warning. Why was her uncle sometimes "Uncle Jack" and sometimes "Dr. Finch?" Did she really call her father "Atticus?" Did an editor/publisher really reject this half a century ago and, if so, how did they have so much more sense than the current one? (I know the answer to this last question: the publisher is laughing all the way to the bank.)

On a four-star scale, this gets a two, because it wasn't actually dreck. Just really boring and somewhat sloppily written. It won't be making any appearances on my best of list later this year, that's for sure.