Guest Author
Did you go out and buy a copy of Go Set a Watchman?
Harper Lee’s manuscript was supposedly found by her lawyer last year and released last Tuesday. Many of Lee’s friends voiced concern that the author might not have wanted the release, but it’s hard to tell. Harper Lee doesn’t talk to the media, she is in her late 80s and resides in an assisted living facility following a stroke. Lee wrote Go Set a Watchman before she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, but the story takes place, with many of the same characters, a few decades later.
Go Set a Watchman is naturally the literary sensation of the summer.
I bought the book the day it came out.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we consistently believe the follow-up to a favorite will be just as good, if not better, than the original?
It never is.
Stephen King wrote a sequel to The Shining, my favorite scary book. The original thrilled and terrified me. Doctor Sleep follows Danny through adulthood and veers off into a tale about weird murderers who travel the country in RVs, brutally killing “shiners” because the thing that gives shiners the ability to shine is also…food.
It’s steam. But it’s also food.
Sure.
Did anyone see Evening Star, the sequel to one of the best films of the 1980s: Terms of Endearment? I did. More like, Evening Wasted.
Don’t get me started on Little Men or Highlander II.
So here we are again, only this time the stakes are higher. To Kill a Mockingbird is not just my favorite book in the whole world. Mockingbird is a beloved classic that changes most readers forever. The book is the kind you read as a high school student, and it hits you one way. You relate to Scout, a bold and independent young child. You feel for Boo Radley, and promise to be a different kind of an adult someday.
Then you read Mockingbird as an adult, and you relate to Atticus, a wise and thoughtful parent.
You share the novel and movie with your children, hoping they too appreciate the tales of empathy and redemption.
And they do. Because they’re great kids.
Then you blow everything to hell by purchasing the author’s new novel and ATTICUS FINCH JOINED THE KKK?!? Are you kidding me?
Where is the nearest window?
Of course, I still relate to Scout, even though she’s Jean Louise now that she’s all grown up. Jean Louise worries about the confines of marriage and when she mingles with her friends, who have grown into wives with children, she loses hope she’ll ever fit in.
That hits home in more ways than one.
Go Set a Watchman takes place in the late 1950s where women had fewer options than today. I keep wanting to tell her, “Hold on!”
But wait a minute, she does live in New York City after all. If my Nana could pop out six kids in Dunmore, Pa., and then go back to school to become a nurse and to hell with anyone who had a problem with it, are there really so few avenues to explore for a spunky, unattached woman like Scout?
It shouldn’t surprise many people who deal with aging fathers that Atticus Finch grows into his 70s and, stricken with rheumatoid arthritis, becomes a bit of a grump. He’s an old man, with bigoted views. In Alabama. In the 1950s.
I suppose this should not be a shocking revelation.
Yes, he was a hero in Mockingbird, taking on Tom Robinson’s case and fighting nobly on behalf of a black man who should never have been charged with a crime. But think about his disposition. Atticus did his duty with solemn honor. He never claimed to have progressive views and the idea that he’d get more conservative as he gets older is probably realistic.
Even if it is disappointing.
I’ve heard people say this new book is a bit of a mess. It wasn’t ever going to live up to expectations. Harper Lee wrote a masterpiece about her childhood in Alabama that touches all of us today and if she still had her wits about her, Watchman might have never been pulled out of storage.
But her new novel does teach us about complex characters who, like all of us, come with charms and challenges. She’s still teaching us something about empathy.
Despite critics’ warnings, if you’re a fan and insist on reading it, please don’t let Go Set a Watchman destroy To Kill a Mockingbird for you. Harper Lee’s new book simply makes her old classic, with its youthful optimism and sincerity, that much better.
Catherine Durkin Robinson co-parents twin sons, organizes parents for advocacy purposes, writes syndicated columns, mentors kids, runs a few races, and investigates missing socks. Follow her on Twitter: @cdurkinrobinson.
