Go Set a Watchman
by harper lee
harpercollins, 288 pages, $27.99
It might be the greatest American literary controversy of recent years: In summer 2015, millions of excited readers discovered to their great dismay ugly racial elements in Harper Lee’s new/old novel, Go Set a Watchman. But this tempest in a book-bag will finally do nothing to undermine the lasting popularity, literary worth, and cultural importance of the book for which she will always be best known, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Of course, Watchman isn’t a new novel, but something of an earlier version of Mockingbird that Lee first submitted to publishers in the mid-1950s. Here, the noble Atticus is an aging lawyer who openly associates with the crude and racist men of the town. Whereas in Mockingbird he opposed the bigots, in Watchman he joins them as they organize to resist the implementation of desegregation policies in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. His daughter, Scout, now in her mid-twenties and visiting home from her erstwhile and vaguely described life in New York, finds Atticus at a meeting where a professional scaremonger warns the sympathetic audience that their concern is “not the question of whether snot-nosed niggers will go to school with your children or ride in the front of the bus . . . it’s whether . . . we will be slaves of the Communists” and “nigger lawyers.”
