Review: ‘Watchman’ more complex, mature than ‘Mockingbird’

“Go Set a Watchman” by Harper Lee (Harper, 278 pages, $27.99)

It’s unfair to compare “Go Set A Watchman” with “To Kill A Mockingbird” but there’s no getting around it – one can’t read it in a vacuum. Harper Lee’s first manuscript, which this week became her second published book, shares the characters, of course, as well as Lee’s clear voice, incisive description of people and evocative description of places, and has a similar narrative structure: a languid start slowly building to a dramatic climax that comes quickly and late. But while “Watchman” explores the same themes as “Mockingbird,” it takes a much more mature, nuanced and even cynical viewpoint.

The story centers on an adult Scout – Jean Louise Finch – coming back to Maycomb County for a visit from New York. Still a firebrand and an iconoclast, she still does not fit in with Aunt Alexandra’s ideal of a good Southern lady. But she’s in a fairly serious relationship with Hank Clinton, a young lawyer who works with Atticus. Jem has died (which we find out in the first chapter, though only much later do we learn what happened to him), Dill is in Europe and Aunt Alexandra has permanently moved in with Atticus, now 72 and suffering from arthritis. Mr. Arthur Radley is never mentioned.

While on her visit home, Jean Louise discovers that her father is involved with the local citizens’ council, as is Hank. Upon seeing them at the meeting with people spewing vilely racist rhetoric, she feels betrayed – “publicly, grossly, and shamelessly” – upset to the point of becoming physically ill. “She knew little of the affairs of men, but she knew that her father’s presence at the table with a man who spewed filth from his mouth – did that make it less filthy? No. It condoned.”

She’s torn between not wanting things in Maycomb to change at all and not liking the way things are. Her emotional turmoil is the centerpiece of the story, and it’s as wrenching as it is inevitable.

Inevitable because any good novel has to have at its heart a conflict. If “Go Set A Watchman” were simply a story of Scout and Jem all grown up and living happily ever after with Atticus, it would be a frightfully dull book. Instead, Lee gives us not a child’s idealized view of her father, but a young woman’s grappling with the messiness of reality: finding her own path, forging her own views, but also climbing into someone else’s skin and walking around in it – even if she doesn’t like how it feels.

In typical Scout fashion, Jean Louise stews and sulks, consumed by her feelings, in a fury and brimming with self-doubt: “What was this blight that had come down over the people she loved? Did she see it in stark relief because she had been away from it? Had it percolated gradually through the years until now? Had it always been under her nose to see if she had only looked?”

The climactic argument between Jean Louise and Atticus is part impotent rage (on her part), part constitutional exegesis (on his). It gets a little heavy-handed, but one can’t help but feel this was probably Lee’s way of trying to thrash out her own progressive views with the reactionary ones of most of the people she loved. (Interestingly, even though this book was written nearly six decades ago, some of the anti-federal-government arguments Atticus makes are close echoes of certain political rhetoric today.)

Atticus Finch was a loving, devoted father and a man with a strong sense of duty and justice, though he was still a product of his time: the Jim Crow South. The racism he couldn’t help but have isn’t the ugly, violent kind, but the perniciously paternalistic kind, faint hints of which are present in “Mockingbird.” It shouldn’t surprise us that he believes in states’ rights and segregation, but it does, and this revelation gut-punches readers who love “Mockingbird” as hard as it hits Scout.

Can she forgive him? Can she reconcile with him? Can she stay true to her principles and work to change the system from within instead of cutting herself off from her home and family? Can we? Can we understand that it was complicated and Atticus believed he was doing the right thing, even if we see his attitudes as deeply flawed? These are the central questions of “Watchman,” and how much one is up to the challenge of facing them will probably determine how well one enjoys the book.

Near the end, Uncle Jack Finch tells Jean Louise, “you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart and a man’s failings.” Perhaps all of us did.

This story was originally published July 14, 2015 at 8:01 PM with the headline "Review: ‘Watchman’ more complex, mature than ‘Mockingbird’."