A REVIEW OF HARPER LEE’S “GO SET A WATCHMAN” (spoilers, sweetie…)

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That individuals evolve and metamorphose, for good or ill, is fairly obvious to everyone who is a contributing member of society or who happens to own a mirror. Genuinely great men are occasionally felled by bad behavior and thoroughly rotten men sometimes rise above their misconduct to become righteous. The only people who do not change, who cannot change, are those trapped in the amber of art—in a book or a play or a film—whose fictional lives are bounded by a running time or a table of contents. And that is precisely why we are able to put some of them, like Atticus Finch, on pedestals and hold them up as paradigms of virtue—they are constant and unchanging examples to which we can forever aspire.

But what happens when the unchangeable man falls from the high pedestal? What happens when he is shattered on the ground beneath? Can we put the broken pieces of Humpty Dumpty back together again, and perhaps more importantly, do we even want to try?

Just how does one go about killing one’s idols?

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While there is some debate about the matter, as it’s popularly understood, Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” was written before “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and it was Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, who read the manuscript and told her that the flashbacks of Jean Louise—aka Scout—as a young girl, growing up in the Depression-era South, was where the real novel was to be found. Lee, according to the publisher, took that advice, as well as a couple of almost throwaway lines about her father defending a black man unjustly accused of rape, and transformed them into one of the most important pieces of American literature. That the population of “Watchman” almost certainly lacks enough character development to work independent of “Mockingbird” is a conspiratorial strike against this party line (or is it just the sign of a unsophisticated author?), but we must accept this conclusion until future evidence overthrows it.

For fans of “Mockingbird,” starting “Watchman” is like returning to your childhood home after decades away (which is exactly what the adult, and now Manhattan-based Jean Louise is doing in the opening pages), overwhelmed by nostalgia and wistfulness. The adult Scout is precisely as we predicted she’d be—a tomboy masquerading as a lady, a feral and deliciously crass grownup who might, at any moment, rip off her civilized costume and flee, chortling, into the Alabama woods. Some of the prose, particularly its keen commentary on gender equality, is sublime and shockingly ahead of its time; the novel starts off feeling so modern. And when “Watchman” is operating as a sort of Southern pastoral idyllic—revisiting the charming streets we know and love, where time moves just a little bit slower than in the rest of the world, and where people still doff their hats to ladies and children, it absolutely sings.

But this warm comfort is an illusion, a sort of bucolic anesthetization that lures you in with the promise of exquisite melancholy and then springs a terrible and illusion-shattering trap.

To be fair, the town of Maycomb has always had a dark underbelly. We saw plenty of it in “Mockingbird.” But that pitch never touched our main characters. They remained above and unsoiled by its creep. But all that changes in “Watchmen.”

Jean Louise hasn’t a single ally in this new novel—her brother Jem has died of the same heart condition that felled their mother, Dill (imagine the grown Truman Copote on whom the character was based) has long since left the place of his youth for the larger, more expansive liberal climes of Europe, and housekeeper Cal has turned on her—every significant white character in the novel, from her aunt and uncle, to the man hoping to make her is wife, to yes, her father, is a white supremacist, embracing segregationist propaganda, and railing against "uppity blacks" and N.A.A.C.P. agitators.

This is not the Maycomb of Depression-era “Mockingbird.” This is the era of Jim Crow. Decades have passed since we were last here, and the federal government is granting blacks greater freedoms than they’ve ever experienced before. This social tumult is hitting the South in its collective solar plexus, fundamentally redefining a way of life centuries old. We assume that Atticus Finch—who famously proclaimed in “Mockingbird,” “As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.”—would be at the forefront of this revolution, championing freedom and justice, but he is not. He is old and frail. He is anxious and afraid. And his once great words and virtues have begun to curdle in the hot, harsh sun of desegregation.

“Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters?” this Atticus asks his daughter. “Do you want them in our world?” The reader desperately hopes the famous lawyer is playing the devil’s advocate for some greater good, for some surprise, virtuous twist, but as the novel continues, so do the heartbreaking revelations. Can the South be blamed, Atticus asks, for wanting to resist a “black plague?” “We’re out numbered here,” he tries to convince his incredulous daughter.

Atticus Finch isn’t a staunch racist, burning crosses and leading lynches—such behavior incenses him—but he is dizzied by the increasing velocity of the civil rights movement, watching his Southern utopia (his speeches throughout the book indicate that, but for the inviolable rule of law, he’d favor secession; Jean Louise’s uncle calls the South “a nation with its own people, existing within a nation”) disappear before his eyes.

What he and the others fail to acknowledge is that this utopia was built on the backs of slaves. For all of its elegance, sophistication and charm, the American South’s identity was, at its core, a thing rotten and putrid and vile. It is not that Atticus does not believe there is a place for free and equal blacks in his society, but that those best equipped to handle this transition—slowly and measured—are white city fathers like himself. “Honey,” he asks his daughter, “you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” And later, “Have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?”

Jean Louise is rocked by these revelations (she likens her father’s views to those of Hitler and Goebbels), as is the reader. She and we move along a sort of modified stages of grief—shock followed by denial leading to burning wrath. In the end, Jean Louise moves ultimately to acceptance. (What choice does she have, some might argue? Was she to banish her entire family over this issue? She certainly considered it.) In Lee’s defense, she finds it all repugnant as well. But like Jean Louise, she too sees some merit even if she loathes the methods. In Lee’s day, Atticus’ sort of soft, intellectual bigotry was barely even recognized as bigotry. Which is why Lee (and her literary avatar) can come to accept this line of thinking. In 2015, it’s not possible to find anti-civil rights arguments as anything other than what they are—reprehensible justifications to do evil.

This ending, following hard upon heavy-handed preachiness and interminable history and political lessons which leaden down the story, and expose Lee’s reliance on speechmaking over storytelling, is too compressed, too rushed, too underdeveloped. It is not earned. Jean Louise moves too quickly from vomit-inducing revulsion to tolerance for her father’s racism. To cross that chasm would require cataclysmic mental anguish not to mention Olympian feats of moral vaulting prowess—but we see next to none of it. This makes an already bewildering situation even more untenable. We may not agree with where Jean Louise ultimately lands, but we should be able to map out the route she took to get there.

I suppose it is possible to talk ourselves into some false comfort, believing “Mockingbird” was Lee’s penance for “Watchmen” and that she recrafted Atticus and perhaps her own views into something more charitable. That she never intended for “Watchman” to see the light of day might embolden this view. But like the ridiculous courtroom edict, when a judge demands a jury disregard a certain piece of damning testimony, this genie is too far out of his bottle to be shoved back in.

For “Watchman” to shock and wound, “Mockingbird” must first have elevated and inspired. Without knowing Atticus Finch as a hero, there is no reason to be affected by his fall from grace. There is not nearly enough of this patrician champion in the novel to warrant such a reading, leading to another possible strike against the order of authorship. Without “Mockingbird” first, “Watchman” barely makes sense. But such conspiracy theories are, in the end, irrelevant, because we do know Atticus Finch, and we love and admire him like few other characters in literary history.

And here, for me, is the most important and painful takeaway of the novel. People are not paradigms. They are fallible. They are imperfect. They are both angels and demons. And in elevating some, we are setting ourselves up for disillusionment and disappointment. A life, lived over nearly a century’s time, gives us all more than enough opportunities to do things we might regret and that will, if discovered, erode our reputations in the eyes of those who admire us. Think about your deepest and darkest secrets—you keep them buried for a reason. To let them out might mean you get torn to pieces. We can forgive impetuousness and even wickedness in youth, assuming, as we do, that wisdom is accrued with years. But what makes “Watchmen” so difficult is that this conceit is flipped. Atticus Finch, the single father of young children, the titan of honor who thunders in defense of justice, the man for whom a courtroom full of black spectators rises when he walks by (“Jean Louise, stand up...your father’s passing.”), the man for whom the bard’s maxim “To Thine Own Self Be True” could have been written, becomes a morally frail, fearful old man. We must assume that our beloved Atticus Finch died a racist piece of shit.

Or is there more to a man than just a single facet?

Harper Lee almost certainly never intended this to be the reader’s conclusion, but if we are to accept this violent cancer to our image of Atticus Finch, we must recognize the crucial, if harrowing importance of assassinating our idols. Art rarely ever requires this of us—which is why the emergence of “Go Set a Watchmen,” for all that recommends it, wounds us so deeply. But real life does more often than we are willing to admit.

“You confused your father with God,” her uncle tells the older and now wiser Scout…and us. “You confused your conscience with his.” I confess I cannot even type those words without tears springing unbidden to my eyes. And while I hate the reason for their eruption, this profoundly problematic novel makes a powerful statement with which we all must wrestle and come to terms eventually. Atticus is finally being reduced from an unassailable icon, Jean Louise’s uncle explains, “to the status of a human being.”

So are we all.

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