Book Review: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird was one of those rare books I managed to fall in love with despite my freshman English teacher (who was just certain our entire class was lying about not being bothered by Scout and Jem calling their father by his first name). I still own a copy and have re-read it a few times in the last 25 years. So when Go Set a Watchman came out, I knew I would read it.

Go Set a Watchman is not so much a “coming of age” novel as it is a “becoming an adult” novel, because those really are two separate things. Scout has grown up. She has come of age, but she has not made that final split from her father. He is still a superhuman in her mind. He is the Atticus Finch we all remember and revere from To Kill a Mockingbird. And that is part of what makes Go Set a Watchman so powerful.

As a reader, we all go on the same journey as Scout. The media outcry at Atticus not being a perfect paragon of virtue has filled numerous blog posts and news articles. It has filled the readers with rage, just as it fills Scout. Just as Scout has spent her entire life idealizing her father, so have we as the reader, whether we first met him in the book or the movie. Atticus Finch is one of our heroes. To see him fall is painful.

I think it is incredibly important to view this book in a historical perspective. It is set in the 1950s. Scout’s friends and classmates fought in WWII. That makes her just a little younger than my grandparents were. Scout is a generation older than the Baby Boomers. That makes Atticus part of the World War I generation. In a more personal perspective, I am 40 years old, and Atticus Finch is of the same generation as my GREAT grandparents.

Reading this book also made me think of my recent life. I adore my father. I have known he was a person with flaws for a while now, so my recent discussions with him around race relations and specifically the Confederate Flag did not cause the collapse of my world the same way Atticus’s holding on to ideas of the past collapse Scout’s world, but I saw definite parallels to that idea of “this is the man who raised me, who taught me right from wrong, so how can we be so far apart on this issue, how can he find something quite right in something I find completely wrong?”.

It brings about a truth of progress, how each generation is actually more liberal than the one before it. And it makes me wonder which of my ideas my own daughter will one day rail against. What will be the thing I hold onto that she cannot believe I believe, because I was the one who raised her to think the way she does? Truly, it is an interesting thought exercise, and a difficult piece of personal reflection.

Go Set a Watchman is not a perfect book. I have a few issues with it. Atticus and his brother basically set Scout up for this realization in a way I find unrealistic. And despite Atticus’s fall from grace in the eyes of Scout and the reader, he still acts the role of perfection. I have never doubted my father’s love for me even in the middle of our most heated disagreements, but that does not mean he would respond with such equanimity if I spoke to him the way Scout speaks to Atticus.

Again, it does not feel like this is a spontaneous thing, but something that he and his brother set Scout up for, planned to the T. And that actually makes me dislike him more than anything else in the story.

My other big issue with the book is the supposed revelation that the reason Scout’s uncle cares for her so much is because he also happened to be in love with her mother. He never married because he remained in love with his brother’s dead wife all of his life, and thought of his niece and nephew as the children of his heart. I think this was supposed to go along with Scout’s life being turned upside down, with her discovering “truths” about her adult relatives that help her become fully adult herself, but it also seemed contrived to me. Could a man not simply care about his niece and nephew because they are his brother’s children? Did it really need this idea of his having been in love with their mother for his love for them to make sense?

But the truth is, that complaint has no bearing on the story. It is one of those things I can whitespace out. I am certain I will return to To Kill a Mockingbird. If nothing else, I will read it again when it is assigned to Pop Tart. I doubt that I will read Go Set a Watchman again, but I can also say, I am glad I read it.