The unearthing of a lost work of literature is an event which should, by all means, be met with celebration. Letters involving authors give glimpses into their intimate lives we would never have seen (James Joyce, anyone?). On the flip side, lost manuscripts can resurface which can theoretically augment an author's body of work. Some things should probably remain lost; in this case, 'lost' might just mean 'thrown directly into the garbage and not intended for public consumption.'
This is both a review of the work as well as an analysis of the plot. There will be spoilers for the entire novel.
The Premise
Scout, the protagonist of To Kill a Mockingbird and now an adult, returns to her home of Maycomb, a fictional town in Alabama. While Scout initially approaches her old home as an unchanging entity—a bastion of familiarity to which she can always return—she quickly discovers that her home, and some people, are not as they seem. Scout then mopes for over a hundred pages until the abrupt ending.
Objectively . . .
Before I smite this book with holy outrage, one first needs to be fully aware of Go Set a Watchman's history, its identity as a lost manuscript, and how exactly it fits into the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird. This book isn't the sequel the publishers would have you believe, nor was it 'once thought lost.' More on that later. I encourage you to speculate on your own, but what is presented here is what I assume to be the most factual account of events.
Go Set a Watchman was supposedly discovered at an appraisal of Harper Lee's estate as early as 2011 as a manuscript locked away in a safe deposit box. In this account, Lee's agent apparently took a fairly long time to realize the manuscript was not in fact a draft of Mockingbird but actually a completely separate book; Lee later fired this agent for attempting to transfer the copyright to him. Later, in 2014 (and after the death of Lee's sister, also her manager), Lee's publisher suddenly decided to reevaluate the contents of the safe deposit box, was impressed by Go Set a Watchman, and went ahead to present the work to Lee to ask her permission for publication. As a side note, conflicting reports (many, many conflicting reports) have stated that Harper Lee has been infirmed for years, is nearly completely blind and deaf, and "will sign just about anything you put in front of her." In short, she had a manager for a pretty good reason.
Worse than those facts, than the possible criminal element involved in the novels' publication and the implication of money-hungry scheming, is the dreadful outcome that Go Set a Watchman is simply not a well-written or interesting novel. And that's just to say the novel on its own is merely bad; when compared to Mockingbird, Watchman is many degrees poorer in nearly every way: pacing, characters, even the novel's action is an objective step down.
Nothing much of note really happens—the dramatic action is almost entirely the personal anguish Jean Louise suffers through as she comes to terms with the fact that her small Southern town is, in fact, a small Southern town, with all of its inherent flaws and prejudices.
I have some bad news for people who may find the novel's big reveal shocking: this wasn't a surprise in the '50s. It's not a surprise now. Jean Louise even makes a comment that she only assumed Maycomb wouldn't have a Citizens' Council simply on the basis that she grew up there. The biggest flaw here is that the most interesting parts of the book are flashbacks to Jean Louise as a child and coping with revelations about her impending fate as an adult; as an actual adult, Jean Louise is horrifyingly ignorant of Southern life. She's supposed to be 26, not 16.
To backtrack a lot, one major flaw of Watchman is its terribly extended exposition. Exposition in a story is generally gradual and serves to introduce the reader to the characters, their flaws, the setting, and sub-plots that may occur. By the one hundred-page mark in Mockingbird, the reader has a fairly intimate knowledge of Maycomb, the main characters, the side characters, Tom Robinson's trial, the gravity of said trial, and most importantly, the novel's antagonist: Bob Ewell, a character who embodies the very ignorance and dirtiness Lee took notice of in the South. We care about Scout growing up but we're reminded of childhood ourselves in her naivete much the same way we begin to cheer for Atticus as a symbol of hope and progress in a town consumed by an ancient and irrevocable hatred, where lynchings still occur and families are living in abject poverty.
At this same pace in Watchman, nothing of significance occurs. The only villainous or antagonistic character, Alexandra, is such a non-threat that her actual threats are presented as jokes. Nothing is truly set up as conflict because the characters are all adults and nothing presents itself as a credible threat either physically or emotionally. Jean Louise gets a little aggravated by Alexandra, but that's not much of a basis for a dramatic character arc. So naturally, when the narrative conflict does arrive, it does so with the subtlety and grace of a sledgehammer.
At exactly the 100-page count Jean Louise discovers a white nationalist pamphlet Atticus had been reading and somehow, at that exact moment, knows exactly that Atticus and her suitor, Hank, are at a Citizens' Council meeting—if you're unaware, these meetings were more or less the anti-Civil Rights movement, where disgruntled whites would gather to discuss such topics as the promotion of segregation or the spreading of racist propaganda. This all happens in the span of one chapter, but more than the abrupt shift in tone, this chapter highlights the emotional immaturity of the writer.
With Mockingbird, themes such as race would come into play with the characters and their interactions. Bob Ewell is hateful, bigoted, dirty, and overall not a very charming figure. We're shown the depths of his hatred through the events of the story; indeed, the themes are presented to readers in a way that we can take away what we want. Ewell is such a memorable antagonist because he's not simply a threat to the main characters—although he does indeed threaten their lives in the novel's climax—but because his victory in court symbolizes a victory for all the negative traits he represents. We don't have to be told what these traits are, they're shown to us through development of his character.
Watchman does not have the sensibilities of Mockingbird, so when a character much like Ewell appears, Jean Louise immediately begins to call him, among other things, "trash." Even more off-putting than being told something like this is the fact that, unlike Mockingbird, Watchman is presented entirely through third-person narration. Despite Mockingbird being written in a far more intimate first-person style, it never explicitly vilifies a character in this way—in fact, I'm going to justify putting this here as a complaint because telling the reader what to think is objectively bad writing. There's no excuse for it, and Mockingbird being so drastically different showcases exactly why this was a poor choice. It's not a very big part of the book, but having the entire thing full of small problems like this certainly adds up.
From here the novel begins a frankly odd and, again, off-putting trend of having every single antagonistic character reciting bigoted thoughts as if they were reading off of a script. These are all long paragraphs and they're almost entirely white supremacist bullet points, told in such a way you'd think Lee just transcribed one of the aforementioned pamphlets. The method in which these scenes are even told is mind-boggling, to say the least. I don't have the book with me (or at all, anymore) so I can't print it verbatim, but an example would be a character saying "all blacks have smaller brains...degenerate...go back to Africa..." and so on with that exact sort of detached grammatical brevity. And these paragraphs just go on and on; I'm sure if it was published in the era it was written that sort of language might be considered shocking much in the way The Jungle impacted readers with its revelations, but to read it now with the hindsight of the Civil Rights movement behind us, this hateful rhetoric is a well-known artifact that should come as a surprise to nobody, and the swathes of page space dedicated to these moments drag on far past their welcome.
This chapter also hits us with the revelation that Go Set a Watchman is in fact not a sequel at all. Not because it was written first; no, even if To Kill a Mockingbird is intended as a prequel to this book, one extremely important fact is noted that completely changes the landscape of the story in the space of a single flashback:
"Atticus took his career in his hands, made good use of a careless indictment, took his stand before a jury, and accomplished what was never before or afterwards done in Maycomb County: he won an acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge. The chief witness for the prosecution was a white girl."
That is simply not what occurred in Mockingbird. In fact, it weakens the dramatic swerve and thematic injustice of that novel's key conflict: despite the evidence being overwhelmingly in his favor, Atticus loses that case for his defendant (a man, not a boy) and shows the audience an ugly side of racial bigotry: that of the uncaring, unflinching reality of apathy. By being published in such a state that contradicts the drama of To Kill a Mockingbird's key scene, Go Set a Watchman in turn weakens it by indicating to the reader that the trial could honestly have gone either way, and it didn't matter in the long run because it was no more than a footnote in Scout's memory.
Jean Louise then spends over a hundred pages moping. She talks about being sad, throwing up, sleeping for several hours, and in general doing nothing of note but wasting pages upon pages by being a completely uninteresting blob. Basically, being me.
I've heard, however, that the climax of the novel emotionally impacted some readers. Therefore, I'd love to tell you how you're all wrong.
Subjectively . . .
After running away from the meeting, as well as some time after Scout's unbearable moping, the plot moves again as slow as it possibly can. Her aunt sets up a "Coffee" for her where her childhood friends are invited to her house for coffee and cake—a coming-of-age ritual of sorts. More paragraphs of disjointed thoughts (not stream-of-consciousness, it's not coherent or written well enough to be that) and blatantly evil discussion of race crops up from her contemporaries with little to no context. Scout becomes a flawless representation of progress by spouting college-level observations and smirking when her brainless friends are too stupid to pick up on it because every last person who is a bigot is also very stupid and can't think for themselves. It's such a huge strawman argument that it comes off as the author not actually knowing the thought process of a bigoted person and just made them as outright villainous as possible, despite how poorly it is told. Scout then pouts a little more.
Near the end of the novel Scout pretty much breaks and confronts her hopeful bride-to-be about the meeting, who more or less tells her the hard truth that—as a former member of one of Maycomb's very real impoverished families—he is forced to assume the role of a social chameleon, being something of a Yes-man to his mentor, Atticus, as well as the governing party of Maycomb. While this should come as no surprise to anyone who has had to grow up around a majority they do not agree with, for some reason this shakes Scout to her core as she ruthlessly denounces Hank as a spineless coward in front of the entire town. While I don't disagree with her assessment, her reasoning for doing so is that of an emotionally stunted child; I didn't feel Scout's dejected outrage, all I felt during these scenes was that Scout, in all her sudden revelations about life, neglected to look inwardly to reflect on whether or not she herself was thinking critically as an adult.
Don't misunderstand, she was totally justified in her horror upon realizing her quaint hometown was something of a bastion for bigotry, but the method in which she deals with it doesn't give me the impression of an individual standing up for truth and justice. Instead, for the entire last two thirds of the book Scout is just a screaming child, lashing out at the world for an injustice that should not have come as a surprise whatsoever. She's twenty-six, did she really believe a small town in Alabama would be some sort of beacon of progress, just because Atticus lives there? This should have been an epiphany for Scout during one of her very many flashbacks, and the novel should have instead dealt with her coming to terms with and acknowledging that fact rather than her disgust and anger at being so slow on the uptake.
What follows is perhaps the most cringe-worthy excuse for a climax I've read in a very long time. Scout confronts Atticus, who espouses some very out-of-character rhetoric about how horrifying it would be to see Scout's children going to mixed schools and other segregationist talking points, but while doing so he attempts to explain why exactly he attended the Council meetings. Truth be told, I was expecting it to be a twist like Atticus was only there as a mediator or something, and in truth that's a part of it. It's revealed he even went to Klan meetings not because he supported the cause, but instead because he feared the concept of anonymity within a hateful backdrop like the KKK. Much with that same fear Atticus attends the Council meetings partly because he wants to know exactly who is on either "side" with the argument of Civil Rights, but at points he mysteriously backpedals and goes back to being a fairly hateful bigot, talking about the "negro race" being in its infancy, that they can't be trusted to make informed decisions on their own.
Part of his fears about the NAACP, however, are still being argued about to this day. The legitimacy of the group's causes, perceived race-baiting, and faux-scientific claims are nothing new, especially now with the prevalence of the internet to allow this sort of discussion with complete anonymity. Said arguments are wrong, but Atticus isn't just some progressive beacon who has notions to wave away this sort of rhetoric. He was born in the 19th century in the South; how is there any surprise that he harbors bigoted thoughts? But that's more or less the climax of the novel: Jean Louise shouts at Atticus like a petulant brat, telling him that she hates his guts and that she never wants to see him again and that he destroyed her. It doesn't read like a mid-twenties adult coming to terms with her surroundings, but instead like a child who can't handle being told they can't have a toy—not a very good analogy, but some of the things she says to Atticus while denouncing him are downright uncalled for. She whines and cries and shouts but in the end, I only felt sorry for Atticus: a man who, despite being so flawed in this novel, calmly states his beliefs (his opinions) and tells Scout that, no matter what, he will always love her. I felt sympathy for this old man who didn't even put up a fight when his daughter, who he raised as a single parent and led her to her own maturity by himself, told him she never wanted to see him again because she couldn't handle his faults.
And this ties into an objective fault of the book: This is not the Atticus of Mockingbird because this takes place in a world where the events of that book did not occur! As much as people want to throw around that this is a sequel, that this is a continuation of To Kill a Mockingbird, if the book contradicts prior story elements then it is objectively a different story entirely. There's no additional depth or nuance to the character; it's impossible to tell whether or not he truly had an emotional attachment to the case because, in this world at least, Atticus successfully defended Tom Robinson. That trial is the single-most important plot detail in either book, and not only is it glossed over like nothing in Watchman but it's given such little importance that it was never even edited after the publication of Mockingbird.
I want you, the reader, to think about that fact a bit. Despite the changed outcome of the story, Lee never thought to go back and change the Go Set a Watchman manuscript. It never occurred to her this novel would ever see the light of day; it was such a low priority that, in the span of FIFTY YEARS, the single word "won" was not altered. That's because this book is a rough draft. It was never intended to be published because rough drafts are merely an additional step in publication. To Kill a Mockingbird is the perfected version of this novel to such a degree, in fact, that the original manuscript for Go Set a Watchman was entirely discarded.
That's not to say the book is entirely not worth your time; rather, I would encourage any hopeful amateur writer to pick this up and then read To Kill a Mockingbird. It's not because one is objectively better (although that is true); a direct comparison is fruitless because these are very different books. Rather, a writer who has yet to suffer through a rough draft might be unaware of just how differently an author's original vision might change over the course of writing a story. Characters may change, events may change, even the dramatic twists and revelations may be entirely different. Regardless of this, a writer may just come to discover their unique voice in a way that the original work couldn't necessarily allow. The best parts of Go Set a Watchman are the intimate flashbacks to Scout as a child, no doubt the biggest inspiration to the change of tone in To Kill a Mockingbird. You might be surprised at how closely the two novels support one another in unique ways, despite being fairly dissimilar in tone and structure.
The Verdict
Go Set a Watchman is not a good book. Even despite its contradictory nature to Harper Lee's claim to fame To Kill a Mockingbird, there really isn't enough here that stands out. The protagonist is insufferable; the dramatic conflict is that she can't handle opinions that are different to her own, even if they are negative or harmful, there's no real villain aside from an enfeebled old man the protagonist has a disagreement with and her crotchety aunt; there is a boatload of exposition that doesn't really pay off—in one example, the novel goes into a long description of an old family and the payoff is that Scout goes to a shop one of the family works at, a pretty annoying detour for a completely irrelevant destination.
That being said, if you're an aspiring writer, then please give it a read. Get it from your local library to compare and contrast Lee's work and you will truly appreciate her growth as a writer. That said, do not buy this book. Don't reward the shady business practices that went behind the publication of this unfinished draft of a better novel; I implore you, rent the book if you want to read it. This is not a sequel, nor is it worth the thirty dollar price tag. A better example of this sort of work was last year's The Haunted Life by American author Jack Kerouac; that novel was correctly labeled as a found, unfinished manuscript with letters by the author, and I found it to be far more interesting taking that element into consideration. With Go Set a Watchman being pushed as a sequel, the only thing that's going to be set is your soon-to-be crushed expectations.
Flawed
