Forget what you’ve read and/or assume about Go Set a Watchman. It is not a “first draft” of To Kill a Mockingbird. And while it may not narrowly meet the definition of sequel, it sure reads like one: a new story, set decades later, with most of the same characters. Indeed, it really feels like the writer of this book assumes readers are familiar with the events and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird. Yes, there are inconsistencies, huge ones, which indicate it was not written after final edits to Mockingbird. But it mostly works as a sequel.
Also, Go Set a Watchman is not remotely, as NPR suggested (and many people suspected), “a mess.” It pleasurable reading, with Lee’s talent for dry humor and poetic description, and her unmatched ability to write perspicaciously about her own terrain. There are some uneven transitions, overlong conversations that could be trimmed (the mansplaining in this book!), and the aforementioned inconsistencies with Mockingbird, but it is not far from the polished sequel that might have been, if Lee had wanted to pursue it. I wonder how much of the decision not to publish this, as is, has more to do with anxiety over how the (white) reading public would receive it, than a judgment on its literary quality? And I wonder if Lee’s decision to abstain had more to do with roiling her community than feeling the manuscript was not up to snuff and beyond salvation?
Now to the touchy spot. The Atticus Finch in Go Set a Watchman is a continuation of the one we love from Mockingbird. It is not a different Atticus, or a different draft of Atticus. Sorry, folks. This is Atticus. Harper Lee goes out of her way to show us that the Atticus in Watchman is every inch the Atticus of Mockingbird. And, as you have probably read, in Wathman Atticus is a bigot.
Keep in mind that even the Mockingbird-era Atticus is a man of his time and place. His attitude toward black people is kind but paternalistic. He maintains his idealism in the courthouse, but the black people he has in his house are servants. He is a perfect example of the white moderate of good will, the kind Martin Luther King described as “the biggest stumbling block” to equality. This new Atticus does fit with that one; he may not fit with the one in your head but he fits with the one in the book.
Early reviewers dropped a “Snape kills Dumbledore” sized spoiler on the reading public, but the reviewers didn’t tell you this: it is supposed to be shocking. It is absolutely devastating to Jean Louise (aka Scout) when she finds out what her father has become. If we feel the soil give way beneath our feet, it’s because that’s exactly what Lee intended to do to us. I’m sorry you had to find out that way. I’m sorry I had to find out that way.
But it’s important for us to accept that this is our beloved Atticus Finch, and not some Bizarro world Atticus Finch, because racism is not just enacted by the uneducated, trashy Ewells of the world. It is also enacted by genteel and well-educated whites, even ones with lofty principles. Jean Louise discovers her father at his racist meeting among “men of substance and character, responsible men, good men. Men of all varieties and reputations.” She hides and listens to the filth spew from their mouths. None spews from her father’s mouth, at this meeting, but he doesn’t speak up. She thinks: “Did that make it less filthy? No, it condoned.”
This is a necessary message, and a necessary postscript to To Kill a Mockingbird. Racism is enacted by kind, polite people. Silence is sanction. If this is not the same Atticus, and if this is not a sequel, there is utterly no point to the book. The book is about Scout, now grown, coming to terms with the frailties of her own origins. Everywhere she goes, all of the people she meets, the people she loves, veer into racist diatribes. Is she of these people, she asks herself? Are these the people she loves? When she describes herself as color blind, it is not to hint that she doesn’t “see color,” in that late 20th Century trope, but that she has been blind to the true nature of her community. To be honest, even Jean Louise’s own New York-influenced high mindedness falls short of 2015 standards (but she’s getting there, her own ideas evolving even in the text.)
This book is a time capsule; perhaps its most glaring deficit in that regard is that Lee could not know how iconic Atticus and Scout would be decades later, how much we would want Atticus to remain a pillar of progressive ethics. Lee writes about him as if he were a mere human character. Perhaps the idealized Atticus Finch is another southern flag that needs to be lowered.
I won’t belabor this point, but I want to set the record straight on the book itself. Go Set a Watchman is not a mess, nor is it a sloppy draft. Read as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, it has powerful and necessary truths, even ones that make us uncomfortable. It deepens and complicates our understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird, and though it is imperfect, it is no stain on Lee’s legacy.
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Note: This was first posted over at The Nerdy Book Club, a great sight for fans of children’s books. Recommended.
EVERYBODY ELSE IS ALREADY TAKEN
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
After I wrote the book BYSTANDER (Macmillan, 2009), I began to receive invitations to speak at middle schools. I was wary at first of being perceived as anybody’s “anti-bullying program.”
I wrote a book. Not a pamphlet, not a list of discussion questions, not a nonfiction guide to bullying. I could not offer a handy list of ten ways to make your school a bully-proof zone. I didn’t even believe in it.
I wrote a story –- that was the tool at my disposal.
Stories are essential to our lives. How could we live without them? We watch television, go to movies, tell tales to our friends and neighbors, conjure dreams at night, play complex video games, read books. Humans are storytelling creatures. We seem to need stories. Something inside us craves stories, we hunger for them, ravenous.
Why is that?
Stories function differently than nonfiction. The characters have a way of worming inside our souls. Robert McKee, in his book, STORY, claims that “Stories are equipment for living.”
Equipment for living.
Our lives race past us, a frantic blur, and we move from the next thing, to the next, to the next, with barely a moment’s reflection.
Stories give us pause. They give our lives form and shape. And time. We turn a page. We consider. We piece together the meaning of our days through the stories we hear.
And we ask of these stories the same question, over and over again: What is a good life? How are we to conduct ourselves here on this earth?
Well-told stories, as Harper Lee so beautifully demonstrated in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, allow us to walk in someone’s else’s shoes. Remember that remarkable scene at the end of the book? When Scout walks Boo Radley home, climbs up to his porch, and for a moment turns and looks at the world from his perspective?
Scout concluded: “Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”
That’s story.
It’s also called empathy, understanding, compassion.
Here’s McKee again: “A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling.”
Story isn’t an escape from reality. It is a light that shines upon the dark corners of our world, the secret places, the hidden fears and hopes and dreams.
It is why books matter, and why, I now know, some teachers have embraced BYSTANDER –- among other novels — as a way to explore this complex topic.
I’ve stood on a stage in auditoriums in front of 500, 600, 700 middle school-age children. Or as they refer to them in Ireland, “young people.” I like that. Young people. So much more intrinsically respectful than kids, little lambs eat ivy.
Despite my experience visiting places like Oklahoma and South Carolina, Illinois and Connecticut, Florida and Michigan, I’m still in the process of learning how to talk about bullying. Still growing into my own shoes. Still learning to speak above a whisper.
One of the central ideas embedded in the book – an idea I came to understand only through the passage of time – also happens to be one that’s incredibly difficult for me to directly convey to middle school students. So I don’t try to tell it, per say, so much as hope it leaks out over everything, like sunlight through the edges of a drawn blind. But I think it’s worth saying to you, here.
Research shows that bullying peaks in middle school. Why is that?
Let’s recall Emerson’s quote from up top, and agree that one of the greatest achievements in life is to become, simply, one’s true self. It sounds easy enough, but as we know, it is not. I’m a father, I have three children, including a 7th-grader and a 9th-grader. I watch their awkwardness and insecurities and struggles.
To be content in your own skin.
To not look to others for your cues.
To accept and trust who you are, to follow your own inner compass.
These are not easy things.
At no time in life is it tougher than in middle school, when peers begin to replace parents as prime influencers. How to dress, what to talk about, what to watch on television, how to act, where to sit, whom to befriend, whom to avoid. This is how we forge identity, hammering out our awareness of self (which is a created thing after all, the “self” we decide to become). At middle school, many of these daily details are powerfully influenced by the pack.
Yet a primary aspect to becoming a true individual is the casting off of those concerns. It’s a challenge for anybody to stand up against the crowd. For a middle schooler, it’s close to impossible. On a deep level, in terms of self-identity, they see themselves as the group. The group is them, the individual swallowed by the great whale. And we are all Pinocchio, trapped inside the dark belly, fumbling for a light, yearning to become a real boy.
This dynamic is how young people find their place in the world. We watch others to learn about ourselves. We tell stories. We listen. And then when it comes to bullying, the adults in their lives tell these young people to not worry what anybody else thinks.
“Who cares what anyone thinks!”
Well, they care. They care so much.
In my heart, I believe the lasting answer to bullying is to become a genuine, authentic, free-thinking, responsible individual. The best definition of responsibility I’ve heard is “the ability to respond,” to act according to the courage of your convictions.
People are good, I absolutely believe that. And the closer people hone into to their true selves, the better and more moral they become.
Be yourself. In doing so, we all become far more likely to allow others the freedom to be their selves.
Shakespeare: “This above all: To thine own self be true!”
Or, if you prefer, Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everybody else is already taken.”
Greetings, I’m Lewis Buzbee, guest-blogger for the day.
Guest blogger: Lewis Buzbee.
It’s true, I’ve hi-jacked James Preller’s blog to bring you a very cool conversation with Mr. Preller (he makes me call him that) about his newest book, Before You Go (Macmillan, July 2012), which is his first Young Adult novel. I’ve taken control here because Mr. Preller is a very generous writer who frequently trumpets and supports the work of his fellow writers, and I figure it was time to hear from him. James has interviewed me twice, and our conversations have been so enjoyable, so thoughtful, I wanted to turn the tables, see what he had to say.
Before You Go, I must tell you, is a deliciously good book, whether you call it YA or not. It centers on a tough summer in the life of Jude, who has to face all of the toughest questions — what is love, what is death, what comes next? It’s everything a novel should be; it’s funny, moving, troubling, smart, and illuminating. Forget the labels, it’s a beautiful novel, and you should read it.
James, you’ve written picture books, chapter books, and middle grade novels; Before You Go is your first Young Adult novel. Why now?
Before You Go was the most logical step in a haphazard career path. You could argue that writing older and longer has been a gradual process for me, roughly parallel to the growth of my own children (Maggie, 11, Gavin, 12, Nick, 19). But you asked, “Why now?” and frankly I don’t have an easy answer for that. Except: opportunity. I’m lucky to have an editor, Liz Szabla, who doesn’t look to put me in a box or turn me into a brand. She supports my randomness.
How was writing Young Adult different?
I felt that writing for young adults came closest to my natural voice. I loved going back to my 16-year-old self, tapping into that rich and vigorous vein. So many ideas and feelings and memories bubbled forth. First love, big emotions, friendships, wild times, painful times, all of it. Location became central to this story, and I set it in my hometown, including real places I’d been. That trip out to the Amityville Horror House, for example, that’s something many of us Long Island kids did in our boredom, in our driving-around-looking-for-something-to-do lives. I am instantly transported back into that car with my high school friends, Kevin, Eric, Billy, and Jim –- a bunch of guys, a little lost, trying to figure out Saturday night.
The facts are fuzzy. A while back I answered ten questions by somebody who was writing a piece to be published . . . somewhere. Hey, it seemed legit at the time.
I do know that my book, ALONG CAME SPIDER, was featured in Michigan — some 1,600 copies were distributed to 4th-graders in 34 public schools — and there was a contest to “win an author,” that prize being me. Which is why, oh wild wonders, I’m winging where I’m winging next week. Grand Rapids, better batten the hatches.
What follows are my answers to the aforementioned ten questions.
1. Where did you grow up? What college did you attend?
The youngest of seven children, I was born in a blizzard in 1961, and grew up in Wantagh, on the south shore of Long Island, NY. I was an indifferent, distracted student in high school. For college, I stayed within the SUNY system and went to Oneonta –- which I loved. That’s where I became a serious, committed student.
2. What/Who motivated you to become a writer?
Look, I wanted to pitch for the New York Mets. When that didn’t work out –- and it became clear very early on –- I had to move on to Plan B. As a teenager, I kept a journal, wrote poems, scribbled lyrics to imaginary songs. Maybe it was a product of being the youngest, but even though I was intensely social, I was always able to be alone. For writers, that’s essential. You have to be okay with solitude.
3. How many books have you written?
I first published in 1986, and my career has been a long journey of trying different things, making tons of compromises along the way. Let’s say that I didn’t hit my first one out of the park. I wrote for food, I wrote to pay the bills. I’ve done more than 80 books overall, I’ve lost count. There are 40 in the Jigsaw Jones series. I’ve learned something from each and every one. But instant success? That was not my path. And I’m okay with it. Really. No, really!
4. In your opinion, what is the major theme in “Along Came Spider?”
It’s a book about the struggle to find your place, about fitting in, and some of the roots and tender shoots of bullying. It’s about being a friend, hopefully a good one, and what those responsibilities might be, which is not always so easy or so clear.
