Go Set A Watchman

The disappointment of Go Set A Watchman isn’t the disappointment in the character of Atticus Finch. By the end of the book, Jean Louise has recognized that she’s as much a “states rightist,” just as offended and outraged by the Supreme Court’s meddling in the South, just as much a bigot as her father. Atticus has been normalized, humanized, and that’s good for Scout, who has always put him on an impossible pedestal. She’s reconciled to Maycomb and her father. One gets the impression that the whole sequence of revelations was an elaborate test to force Jean Louise to take a stand for herself, against her father, so they could enter the human race together as adults. She had to develop a conscience of her own, and Maycomb conspired to make sure she did.

The disappointment is more in the fact that the novel isn’t all that good. Jean Louise’s reaction to seeing her father sitting with a citizen’s council that is organizing Maycomb’s resistance to the NAACP is highstrung, as if she were a delicate Southern flower exposed suddenly to the cruel world. It’s the response of a child, not the response of a woman who has been living in New York for a few years. The book is terribly preachy, the final chapters essentially nothing but long, actionless and ultimately passionless, didactic dialogues, first between Jean Louise and her Uncle Jack, then between Jean Louise and her father.

What shouldn’t be missed in all this discussion of the politics of the book are the delightful, amusing touches in the book. Lee isn’t a great writer; she is a smooth stylist, but not a bold one. She – I don’t mean the term to be demeaning, only descriptive – is a charming writer, and in a book that strives too hard to tackle Serious Public Issues, Lee didn’t forget to be charming.

Two paragraphs illustrate. Jean Louise is helping her aunt Alexandra host a morning Coffee. She has a hard time connecting with the ladies of Maycomb, and she drifts from the Newlyweds to the “Diaper Set” of new moms, to the singles, the “Perennial Hopefuls,” picking up snippets of conversation along the way. Here are the the members of the Diaper Set: “When Jerry was two months old he looked up at me and said . . . toilet training should really begin when . . . he was christened he grabbed Mr. Stone by the hair and Mr. Stone . . . wets the bed now. I broke her of that the same time I broke her from sucking her finger, with . . .  the cu-utest, absolutely the cutest sweatshirt you’ve ever seen: it’s got a little red elephant and ‘Crimson Tide’ written right across the front . . . and it cost us five dollars to get it yanked out.”

Then the thirty-somethings of the “Light Brigade”: “John says . . . Calvin says it’s the . . . kidneys, but Allen took me off fried things . . . when I got caught in that zipper I like to have never . . . wonder what on earth makes her think she can get away with it . . . poor thing, if I were in her place I’d take . . . shock treatments, that’s what she had. They say she  . . . kicks back the rug every Saturday night when Lawrence Welk comes on . . . and laugh, I thought I’d die! There he was, in  . . . my old wedding dress, and you know, I can still wear it.”

Charm is a rare and underappreciated quality in a writer, especially in a day when raw realism is more marketable.