‘Go Set A Watchman’ Review Roundup: Harper Lee Novel Divides Critics

Go Set a Watchman, the much anticipated second novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee, leaves critics searching for comparisons and contradictions with American classic To Kill a Mockingbird.

Go Set A Watchman Reviews

Penned as Lee’s original manuscript, Go Set a Watchman is set in the 1950s, when Jean Louise (Scout) heads back home to Maycomb, Georgia after spending half a decade in New York City trying to make it as an artist. Upon her return, she finds her father Atticus much changed. To her great disappointment, she realizes that her once saintly-seeming father has become just another bigot in their small southern town.

Reviews of Go Set a Watchman are unable to untangle the roots of To Kill a Mockingbird from the newly published work. Lee had changed the Go Set a Watchman manuscript drastically on the direction of her editor to tell the story of her idealistic childhood instead of the disillusionment of her adulthood. More than anything, the shift in the book’s central theme seems to be a disorienting one for critics, who’ve noted Lee’s engaging voice can still be heard in Go Set a Watchmen.

“The depiction of Atticus in “Watchman” makes for disturbing reading, and for “Mockingbird” fans, it’s especially disorienting. Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion. […] The reader, like Scout, cannot help feeling baffled and distressed. […] “Mockingbird” suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while “Watchman” asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus.” – Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“[Watchman] is one whose success, on its own merits, is nearly impossible and rather pointless to evaluate. Watchman is more successful as an amplification of characters it shares with Mockingbird, where they are better-developed. Watchman is both a painful complication of Harper Lee’s beloved book and a confirmation that a novel read widely by schoolchildren is far more bitter than sweet.[…]Readers will be dispirited from the first chapter, with the revelation that, in the years between Scout’s childhood and her return to Maycomb, Ala., at 26, her brother Jem has died and her father Atticus has grown infirm. This burst of exposition, as with other clumsy moments of plotting and sporadic jumps back in time, works only because the characters are already famous.” – Daniel D’Addario, Time

“Go Set a Watchman” is a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This story is of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion. […] It stays close to Jean Louise’s perspective and contains the familiar pleasures of Ms. Lee’s writing—the easy, drawling rhythms, the flashes of insouciant humor, the love of anecdote. The most charming early passages concern Jean Louise’s irreverent but affectionate depictions of life in Maycomb. […] Some of the flashbacks to the halcyon 1930s take up whole chapters and feel clumsily integrated, but it’s interesting to see the glimmerings of a Pulitzer Prize winner.” – Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

Throughout the first part of the book, Lee builds the tension, drawing us in slowly, revealing the Maycomb her protagonist thought she knew. We visit Finch’s Landing, experience flashbacks to her childhood with Jem and Dill and meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Henry Clinton. The pace can be, at times, meandering, but the focus appears to sharpen with her discovery, among her father’s reading materials, of a racist tract called “The Black Plague.” “The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her,” Lee writes, “the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, ‘He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentlemen,’ had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.” That’s a vivid set-up, and it indicates the promise Hohoff recognized in this draft nearly 60 years ago.” – David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

Go Set a Watchman will be released Tuesday, July 14.