Harper Lee’s much anticipated release of Go Set A Watchmen has sold very well and received mixed reviews. I find myself very protective of Watchmen and I’ll tell you why.
It’s true that the first half of the book is stronger than the second and that it’s not as technically sophisticated as Mockingbird. Yet, it’s a more complex read, more nebulous, a book that makes you look inside yourself in ways that Mockingbird doesn’t.
Mockingbird is easy to love, easy to get behind. Written in beautiful, world-class prose that draws you in and holds you in a Southern child’s world of both the real and the magical, it’s deeply moving. The reader is invited to explore difficult motivating factors against a backdrop of a society that nearly everyone can feel self-righteous about pointing fingers at. The reader becomes a part of a whole class of reader. One who loves the scamp Scout and admires Atticus as much as she does. Generations of us have grown up comparing our own fathers to Atticus and his courage. And we feel sympathy for the position of the raped girl in unequal proportion to the man she unjustly accused. And need I repeat, all of that is so easy to get behind.
Watchmen is more complicated. It’s not as easy to love for a number of reasons. The writing is not flawless; Lee falls back on pages of dialogue to get her points across in the latter portion of the book and it’s not as effective as some other of her modes of storytelling. Atticus is no longer a man we can admire as trustingly and blindly as the child Scout, and indeed many readers did, and I think some readers are taking that as a personal loss.
But I can’t agree that Watchmen is not as valuable a novel. Atticus was a product of his time. He was a good man but he didn’t have the next 70 years worth of American experience to rely on in forming his opinions. Already in his 70’s he had to give us what many, many people do later in their lives. A more conservative worldview and less patience for and hope in idealism as a realistic strategy.
In Watchmen we’re asked to confront more difficult circumstances, more nebulous circumstances, and hear them defended by people we thought we could trust with the future of a color-blind South. They raise issues from the perspective of the 1950’s, not 2015. In addition, the issue of The Southern Way of Life comes to the fore explained with a realistic and accessible passion that makes it difficult to dismiss. The North has never been asked to abandon it’s heritage (except perhaps when GM left Flint), what makes it feel psychologically whole, so I think it’s easy for us to dismiss the power of heritage here above the Mason-Dixon line and point fingers at the South.
I was raised in Virginia by Yankee parents and the sense of cultural space embodied by the South is something that’s difficult to understand if you haven’t lived in it. I’m not defending the overt racism of the South (as opposed to the covert racism of the North) but Watchmen does an excellent job of laying out both how integral it is to that culture and how it threatens its very fabric.
It’s impossible not to say, “It has to end. We can’t go forward like this.” Black Lives Matter, yes. The Confederate flags must come down, yes. The school drop-out rates must be equalized, yes. The poverty rate must be obliterated, yes. But these are complicated problems and it’s only through the type of conversations that we have in Watchmen that hearts and minds can change in ways that lead to broader societal change. There’s a bookstore in Traverse City that’s issuing refunds for Watchmen, stating that it can’t stand on it’s own, it’s merely an academic backdrop to Mockingbird. Nonsense. Watchmen excites conversation that is more difficult than Mockingbird and I’d be happy to have a conversation about it with anyone who says otherwise.
What I haven’t heard mentioned much is talk about Jean Louise’s coming to terms with her father. Because she does. She doesn’t storm out of Maycomb as she had been intending after her big fight with Atticus, leaving them all to rot in the hell they’d made for themselves. She stays and has one last very important talk with Uncle Jack, and then she goes back to Atticus. The Finches are, after all, her people. She will not leave them. She is them. She is that tarnished heritage. And she belongs there, wherever she chooses to hang her hat. Watchmen tells us unequivocally that you can’t escape your family. You can’t escape your heritage. We all have a role to play and Harper Lee is not about escaping responsibility. She’s about embracing it. It’s only through embracing responsibility that we move forward as individual family units and as a larger society. Watchmen tells that story perfectly.
Plum Librarian LLC 