(Note to reader: the following review includes vague spoilers; the linked articles give specific ones.)
Even a piece of fiction can break your heart.
Reading Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is like unintentionally walking in on a half-dressed bride. Some highly-stressed Aunt Alexandra-type hollered to go get her; surely she was ready, and so you and several others went running to her dressing room, knocked once, and flung the door open wide. (Let’s go! Goodness knows everyone’s been waiting forever.)
But they were wrong. She’s nowhere close to ready. Now, no one knows what to do or say.
Looking at her, she’s beautiful, but she’s undone. You know when she’s had time to fully prepare herself, she will be stunning, but seeing her as she is now reveals an all-too awkward humanity: her naked face is devoid of makeup revealing all-too-human skin; there’s a hot mess of hair oddly pinned, undergarments that are none of your business, and a run in her stocking she’s trying to patch with pale pink nail polish because she doesn’t have any clear. She didn’t even hear you come barging in.
You want to apologize, but there’s no point: you can’t un-see what you’ve seen; you can’t make it right, so you quietly close the door and give the human girl the space and time she needs to become the flawless goddess she needs to be to stand before her devoted but highly critical public.
This book is an un-done bride, and it is a gut-punch.
There is much controversy regarding whether it should have been published at all. I’m pretty sure Harper Lee’s manuscript was not ready for publication, and not sure Ms. Lee truly wanted it to be published at all in its current state. No one else seems to be sure, either, and I guess that’s a moot point: the half-dressed bride has been revealed very publicly. One can’t shove the toothpaste back into the tube.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that both To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman were intended to be one novel. (The initial submission of TKAM included GSAW.) Go Set a Watchman has several passages that are taken word-for-word from TKAM. It seems possible to me, and even probable, that after reading the full tale, Lee’s editors wanted to make the book more marketable (readers today will have a hard time with the themes in this book; readers in 1960s America would have had an even harder time), so they could have asked Lee to focus on the childhood story of Scout, Jem, Dill, and make Atticus a beloved archtype thereby giving us the beloved book any English teacher worth a decent prepositional phrase assigned you somewhere around the tenth grade.
The book so many people are reading now was originally set aside, or left on the editing room floor, and the recently-discovered remaining copy of Lee’s complete initial manuscript must have appeared as buried treasure to those who found it. How awful to say this, but I fear the Big Payday played a pretty significant role in the publication of this novel.
That said, the novel is worth reading, and even important, if you can bear to have your heart broken.
Go Set a Watchman is hard:
On page 13, Lee sends you to the mat with a vicious punch without so much as a by-your-leave and continues on as though nothing has happened. By Part Six, she has ripped back the curtain and shown us the flaws in our deities; it is nearly more than a heart can bear. You find yourself begging her to stop: she’s revealing irreparable cracks in a foundation she is tearing down without sympathy: in TKAM, Atticus is a sinless God, patient, funny, wise and good; in GSAW he is a Lucifer, son of the morning, fallen from grace after the revelation of his unpardonable sin. This is very difficult for Jean Louise, who worshiped her father. And for all of us, who were evangelized and converted by her narration of his deeds in TKAM. The crux of the book is Jean Louise’s (I seriously can’t get used to calling her that) journey through that hell.
It’s hilarious:
When Dill comes blazing into Chapter 5 saying, “I’m the Holy Ghost!” you will find yourself in tears from laughing so hard. Trust me. Bet you a nickel you laugh out loud and tears stream.
It’s wrong:
There are errors, or, better stated, inconsistencies with the facts of the story told in To Kill a Mockingbird. For instance, on page 109 of GSAW one reads that Atticus got Tom Robinson acquitted, but in TKAM Tom is convicted. To me, this is further evidence that the books were intended to be one unit and that Lee had a different plotline in the initial submission. Some of the writing is rough and as a stand-alone novel, it’s clunky and oddly constructed. It needs To Kill a Mockingbird in order to be complete.
It’s beautiful:
From the book: “The course of English literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower, she thought.” What a lovely sentence. When Lee’s on, her perfectly-pitched Southern voice is full of gems like that.
It hurts:
From the book: “Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me–these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.”
For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. -Isaiah 21:6
The beloved characters from TKAM hurt one another terribly. It cuts the reader to read it. You’re certain there is no hope for them, for their Maycomb, and for us now. But, keep reading because there is; it’s just damn hard because the hope requires painful growth: Scout (and the reader) have to learn to love more fiercely than politics, with more fury than theology, and more permanence than race.
Many people think GSAW’s central themes are racism and betrayal, disillusionment and growing into yourself. I think those themes are there, but there is a deeper central theme: love, if we let it, can be more powerful than all of those things, no matter who we are or what we believe and how much our beliefs clash with those who are important to us.