There's been a boatful of cynicism circulating around Harper Lee's new novel, Go Set a Watchman, which HarperCollins published this week, some 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. While I don't wish to dispute the importance of what went on behind the scenes with the manuscript -- the enigmatic workings of Sotheby's and the lawyers and, of course, the big bucks resting on the book publishing phenomenon itself -- I was more interested in the book as a fiction writer myself considering the work of another writer, one who achieved such outsize success and then seemed to vanish for so long.
When I first heard about the book's release, I thought of Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk on what came after Eat, Pray, Love and how she managed the crippling side of success.
It made me wonder whether Harper Lee could ever write anything to hold a candle to Mockingbird, a book that has so taken on a life of its own, one that has collected the sentiments of generations. I didn't doubt that Go Set a Watchman would be a disappointment, both to me and many others who grew up with the book. I was just curious about what kind of disappointment it might be. How big, how ugly, how sad. It was, after all, written by an ordinary person, on a blank sheet of paper, at an ordinary typewriter.
And then the reviews started trickling in... I read them with caution. I couldn't see Atticus Finch, as much as any character can in a person's mind, morphing into some a bigot tout court. I can't really see that happening in many circumstances, for anyone.
What I couldn't anticipate when I read the book myself was, for one, how much it would make me laugh, what a joy it would be to revisit these characters, spend a few more pages with larger-than-life Dill... but more important, what a profound little book Harper Lee had turned out -- and how 55 years late might have been right on time. A little book published that deals with what we think we knew about racism, and how it evolves over time... from something like Loving v. Virginia or Brown v. the Board of Education to Ferguson, and Charleston, and Eric Garner. You may be done with racism, but racism isn't done with you.
A little book published 55 years late a week after the Supreme Court of the United States declares same-sex marriage a Constitutional right?
As a gay man, I'm inclined to read the novel in light of LGBT rights. I see myself in Scout, Jean Louise as she's called in Watchman. A few years ago I had a falling out with a friend because I couldn't understand why she'd support Obama, despite what I felt were his (then) hypocritical positions on gay rights (positions he's since made significant progress in reversing). If my friend was Atticus -- one of the most good-hearted people I know, a deep thinker, a compassionate soul -- I was Jean Louise... a turnip-size bigot. Unbending. Unyielding. Unwilling to meet people where they were. If your son was in the Boy Scouts, I wanted nothing to do with you. I couldn't fathom that I was being lazy or stubborn, that my stance was alienating and little else.
Jean Louise's uncle explains this phenomenon well at the end of the novel:
The time your friends need you is when they're wrong, Jean Louise. They don't need you when they're right.
I hope that people quick to dismiss the novel -- who won't even pick it up because it somehow taints the icon of Atticus Finch -- might give it a second chance. Might consider their own bigotry, if turnip-sized, and might consider what investment they have in a purer Atticus. That Atticus certainly raises fewer questions.
If Mockingbird was about the rule of law and justice, about community and equality, Watchman tackles something even more intractable: the prejudice we find in those we love. The next time you log on to your Facebook account, and your grandmother or your aunt or father-in-law has posted something you find offensive, consider where that puts you, how you respond, and what kind of person that makes you. It's a profound novel, a thought-provoking novel, and I can't imagine it being any more timely.
The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.
That's from Justice Kennedy's opinion on the Obergefell v. Hodges case that guaranteed the right to marry to same-sex couples a few weeks back.
In the end, I have to think Mockingbird grappled with justice and Watchman with humility -- the humility to know our own shortcomings. We are constantly learning the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions. And Jean-Louise, she's the future generations Kennedy was talking about.