Book Review: Go Set a Watchman

A few decades ago I read an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story called The Ice Palace. Its theme – the culture clash between the American North and South -- was intimately understood by the Minnesota native who'd married an Alabama belle.

I’ve been fascinated with this clash ever since. So while I picked up Go Set a Watchman because there was no way I was going to miss the second Harper Lee novel, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it covers this topic, largely because the now-adult, NYC-based Scout visits Maycomb yearly.

While Mockingbird’s perspective was obviously ensconced in the south, Watchman looks at that same culture with slightly northern eyes. If Scout once viewed Maycomb from Boo Radley's porch, she now sees it from much further away, especially as it regards racism and her father’s involvement in it.

For yes, it turns out that the great Atticus Finch was a racist. I was surprised but ultimately not shocked. Why not? Because nothing about this good man's behavior in Mockingbird hinted that he was more than just that: a good man. Not a radical one.

Remember that conversation in Mockingbird between Miss Maudie, Scout, and Jem, the one in which Maudie reminds the children that Atticus has been chosen to do Maycomb’s dirty work for them? He was asked to defend Tom Robinson. He didn’t volunteer. There were good people in Maycomb, good enough, anyway, to try and do the right thing even when the outcome was a forgone conclusion. They asked Atticus because they wanted a representation of their best intentions to prove they were better than the mob who tried to lynch Tom Robinson before the trial, and certainly better than Bob Ewell, the white trash who accused him in the first place.

For readers to now discover that Maycomb's best white citizen didn’t actually consider blacks as equals is of course a huge disappointment. But why should we be surprised that a pre-civil rights southern white man held such abhorrent views?

Although he was the best in his own sphere, he was ensconced in that sphere. He might put his reputation and safety on the line to defend a falsely-accused black man but that didn’t mean he’d approve of his daughter marrying a black man (or, even, as he says in Watchman, go to school with her).

Regarding Scout’s possible marriage (and a new topic): she has a beau in Watchman. Henry, her father’s junior law partner, is her on-again-whenever-she-comes-home beau, a romance built on a post-Mockingbird childhood friendship. And if it’s patently obvious that Atticus wouldn’t have approved a black man as son-in-law, Aunt Alexandra – now living with her brother – does not approve of where the Scout-Hank relationship might go:

We Finches do not marry the children of rednecked white trash which is exactly what Henry’s parents were when the were born and were all their lives. You can’t call them anything better. The only reason Henry’s like he is now is because your father took him in hand when he was a boy, and because the war came along and paid for his education. Fine boy as he is, it won’t wash the trash out of him.

Later on in the novel, Henry reiterates the point to Scout:

You can parade around town in your dungarees with your shirttail out and barefooted if you want to. Maycomb says, ‘That’s the Finch in her, that’s just Her Way.’ Maycomb grins and goes about its business: old Scout Finch never changes…

But let Henry Clinton show any signs of deviatin’ from the norm and Maycomb says, not ‘That’s the Clinton in him,’ but ‘That’s the trash in him.’”

I find this absolutely fascinating: within certain social realms there are enormous differences visible only to the citizens of that realm. This seems especially so in the South, at least in novels like this one and GWTW.

Regarding the rest of the novel: although I found one section absolutely gut-splitting – the flashback wherein Jem, Dill, and Scout put on their own “revival” – the rest of the novel was underwhelming. For me, it lacked the earlier novel’s potent combination of nostalgia and transcendence. Unfair assessment? Perhaps. And perhaps I’ve now joined the ranks of absurd reviewers who rate a book for what they think it should have been rather than for what it is: i.e., giving a brownie cookbook one star for not mentioning cookies or a YA book two for not being adult. Call me absurd then but Watchman is no Mockingbird and while I couldn't put the former down and am glad to have read it, it's unlikely I’ll be rereading it anytime soon.