What Are You Reading

[Fading Fast]

Just finished "Go Set a Watchman." I was very impressed. It has a very similar style to "To Kill a Mockingbird," so stylistically, if you like that book, this should work as well.

Spoiler alert - there is no way to talk about the book without giving some of the plot away, so please only read on if you are okay with that.

As to the controversy, TKAM is a fantastic morality play that, while nuanced in detail, at a high level has good guys and bad guys and we know who they are. It tells a wonderful story, brings the depression-era South to life, creates characters one feels they know and delivers a powerful message about the ugliness of racism and, via Atticus Finch, a positive message of human nature at its best.

GSAW's morality is more complex, unclear, of its time and anything but neat. That is was written in the 1950s is, IMHO, an wonderful artifact that displays several real-time windows into White and Black southern views toward desegregation. Some of it isn't pretty, especially to a 2015 value system, but it feels genuine. It is what many believed then, at least based on my understanding of the time.

As has been well publicized, Atticus Finch is not in favor a desegregation and this has shocked and angered many. While it did both to me, as the arguments are revealed, I felt he was a man of his times, no longer the perfect hero of TKAM, but a complex human being trying to adjust to a country moving faster than he believed was right and certainly faster than he could. I was impressed with the level and variety of arguments presented. Several views - some very modern and reasonably consistent with our views today - were asserted with passion and depth. It forces you to think, to re-read a paragraph or page, to thumb back a few more pages, to see where the flaw in the arguments are (or aren't).

Philosophically, this is a much more mature book than TKAM as it brings out more of the grey in its characters and arguments and it doesn't wrap it up in a neat bow. It isn't always fun - and to a 2015 worldview, some of it is very raw and ugly - but literature should challenge you, should force you to think about things from a different perspective and a different time period - and on that front, this book delivers.

While philosophically more mature, the book did seem uneven in parts and, in that sense, reveals an author still trying to master her craft. But it takes on so much more (including Scout's coming of age as a teenager juxtaposed with her more jaded mid-twenties, I've-lived-in-New-York-City self), that one can forgive its less-than-perfect execution. If one wants to re-read TKAM (which I did a few months ago), then it will fortunately always be there. If one wants to read a more complex and more flawed book, but still an impressive literary achievement, than GSAW will prove challenging but rewarding.

 

[pawineguy]

The Coldest Winter.
I think I need to learn much more about the Korean War.

Read it a few years back and was shocked by the scope of the war, given its relatively short duration.

 

[Fading Fast]

I'm curious if others have read "Go Set a Watchman," or if you plan to? And if you have, your thoughts? In no particular order and not a complete list - Lizzie, AmateisGal, Touchofevil, Bushman, Wally Hood (I've just had more conversations with all of you, but also curious about our other regular poster's thoughts)? The book got a ton of press, but surprisingly, not much chat time on our site.

 

[Bamaboots]

FF, after all I've read about GSAW, I'm convinced HarperCollins should have hired you as publicist for the book. Been a fan of Ms. Lee's since I read TKAM many years ago and watched the movie countless times. I'll be reading GSAW, now that you finished it and posted your thoughts on it. The way it's been received down here, I'll probably be able to get it off the discount rack.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I leafed thru a copy at the local bookstore a couple days ago, but haven't yet purchased. I'm still intending to, but I'm waiting for all the hubbub to die down. I don't want that to color my opinions going in.

 

[AmateisGal]

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder. I must confess that his theory that climate change could possibly lead to another type of Holocaust is a bit hard for me to swallow.

One of the statements in his conclusion: "Climate change as a local problem can produce local conflicts; climate change as a global crisis might generate the demand for global victims. (pg. 327)."

He also talks about Hitler seeing the Jews as an ecological blight.

I need to read more, but at this point, I'm not convinced of his thesis. I think it's a stretch.

 

[Wally_Hood]

Just finished The Walking Stick, from 1967, about a young English lady who is an antiques expert who enters into a relationship with a painter, which in turn leads to entanglement with the wrong side of the art world. Interesting crime fiction reading.

FF, I probably won't read GSAW, but will follow the Fedora Lounge Literary Society's discussions.

 

[Touchofevil]

I'm curious if others have read "Go Set a Watchman," or if you plan to? And if you have, your thoughts? In no particular order and not a complete list - Lizzie, AmateisGal, Touchofevil, Bushman, Wally Hood (I've just had more conversations with all of you, but also curious about our other regular poster's thoughts)? The book got a ton of press, but surprisingly, not much chat time on our site.

I am curious, but not overly so. I probably will at some point, but as to when now that school has started, it will be later than sooner.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've begun GSAW, and am about a third of the way into it. So far, it seems less a novel than an extended character sketch of a young woman on the cusp of putting away her childhood idealizations and facing up to the realities of the adult world. In that sense it's very much a book typical of the intellectual mindset of 1957 -- a moment in time when America itself was starting to put away its early postwar illusions and facing up to cold realities of its own.

The fact that the book was written and set at just that point where the mid-fifties were turning into the late fifties will be absolutely crucial to understanding and interpreting what it has to say about race. Suffice it to say that so far, nothing has come out of Atticus Finch's mouth that wouldn't be entirely normal and expected for a man born into a middle-class Southern family in 1885, however distasteful those views may be to those who have the idealized picture of Mr. Finch from TKAM firmly in mind. The reader will be forced to confront and question that idealization just as Jean Louise is being forced to do over the course of the book.

Despite the fact that GSAW was never written as any kind of a "sequel" to TKAM, if you read it with that perspective in mind, it works extremely well as one.

I'll have a lot more to say as I go along. But that's where I stand for now.

 

[Harp]

So far, it seems less a novel than an extended character sketch of a young woman on the cusp of putting away her childhood idealizations...

Michiko Kakutani's review in the July 10th International New York Times claims that Watchman was initially
submitted to publishers in 1957; rewritten after editorial criticism, and eventually released as To Kill A Mockingbird.
The first draft apparently having been abandoned, never subsequently resurrected by Lee; who now apparently has dementia,
raises the specter of Henry James' "But of whom, when it comes to the point, is the fable narrated?"

 

[AmateisGal]

I don't know if I'll read GSAW or not. Maybe later after the novelty has worn off and it's available at the library.

Last night I finished reading E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed. I am amazed he was never wounded during his entire time in the Pacific. Almost unheard of.

 

[Fading Fast]

I don't know if I'll read GSAW or not. Maybe later after the novelty has worn off and it's available at the library.

Last night I finished reading E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed. I am amazed he was never wounded during his entire time in the Pacific. Almost unheard of.

I'm going to try to encourage you to read it. As a writer, I think you'll appreciate seeing Harper Lee tackle similar characters from a very different angle. And it is a well-written if flawed book: much, much better than many of today's "best sellers." Plus , selfishly, I want to hear your opinion, read your review and be able to discuss it with you.

 

[AmateisGal]

I'm going to try to encourage you to read it. As a writer, I think you'll appreciate seeing Harper Lee tackle similar characters from a very different angle. And it is a well-written if flawed book: much, much better than many of today's "best sellers." Plus , selfishly, I want to hear your opinion, read your review and be able to discuss it with you.

LOL. Ok, you've convinced me. I'll put it in the queue.

 

[2jakes]

An Artist of the Floating World. ('86) K. Ishiguro

"For Ishiguro's characters, the present is always informed by the past."

 

[TimeWarpWife]

I'm actually reading two books about real people who lived as Christians in Nazi Germany. One is about Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer called Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas. The other is an autobiography by Anita Dittman called Trapped in Hitler's Hell: How A Young Jewish Girl Discovers the Messiah's Faithfulness in the Midst of the Holocaust. Ms. Dittman was born to an atheist father and Jewish mother, but became a Christian as a child. I am simply in awe of the hardships both lived through and yet their faith in Christ sustained them - for Dittman it would lead her eventually to coming to the United States and for Pastor Bonhoeffer it would lead him to the Nazi gallows just weeks before the camp he was in was liberated.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Okey, I've finished "Go Set A Watchman," and herewith my thoughts...

First off, I'll be about the millionth person to say this, but this book isn't "To Kill A Mockingbird." The triumph and the curse of Harper Lee's life is that she wrote a book that so completely defined her literary career that nothing she ever did or could ever do would ever compare to it, which is why she hasn't actually written anything since. GSAW won't change that impression. It will never be assigned to eighth graders, and it will never be shelved in the YA section at your town library. And I doubt the movie, when they make it, will be an immortal and beloved screen classic.

GSAW also isn't really a novel. It's not even, really, a novelette. As I said in earlier remarks it's primarily a character piece with a negligible plot, but there was a very strong tradition for this sort of thing in 1950s America -- not in print so much as in live television drama. The book reads very much like an early-fifties New York teleplay, like the sort of thing Paddy Chayefsky or Rod Serling might have written for Studio One or the Kraft Television Theatre, and I think, in fact, that it could be very easily adapted to a teleplay or live-theatre format, and it would be far more effective as such than as the short book that it is.

As for the theme of the book, again, it's not so much about race as it is about the shattering of personal illusions. We all have heroes, people we look up to, people we think of as moral paragons, and they will always disappoint us because, in the end, they're made of the same compressed dust and dirt as anyone else. Jean Louise learns this lesson, and learnng it finally makes an adult out of her. And I submit that, in a way that Harper Lee never could have envisioned, because of the circumstances under which the book was finally published, we, the readers, have to give up our illusions about Atticus Finch in the same way in order to really understand who he is and what made him the way that he is.

As I said before, nothing comes out of his mouth that wouldn't be completely accurate for a middle-class Southerner who was born in 1885. He was raised by the generation that came of age during the Civil War, the generation that experienced Reconstruction, and the generation that constructed the entire legal apparatus of the disenfranchisement of African-Americans and the legal mechanisms of Jim Crow with its own hands. And to morally justify these constructions, that generation enshrined and ensured the perpetuation of the South's most sacred myth -- that of the Lost Cause. Uncle Jack, amidst the vast blind of constitutional rationalizations that he threw up in his speech to Jean Louise, actually hit upon something very important -- the image antebellum middle-class Southern whites had of themselves as an aristocracy, the heirs of fine old Anglo-Saxon blood, of a lost nobility whose genteel world was taken away by the unwanted meddling of outside forces. It was Jack's -- and, in the end, Atticus's enduring belief in that myth that enabled them to rationalize their support for a system that depended for its very existence on the ruthless exploitation of an "inferior" race. It was a "paternalistic" and "kindly" exploitation in their view -- one which allowed for a certain form of "respect" and "fondness," even -- but even as that world was crumbling about them, the Jacks and the Atticuses of the South couldn't and *wouldn't* see where they were wrong, because for them to admit that they were wrong was to admit that everything they'd been raised to believe in and cherish about their system and their society and their appointed place in that society was a fraud.

That doesn't mean they were wicked, evil men. They weren't lynching sharecroppers or night-riding or setting dogs on protesters. They loved their families, they were kind to everyone they met -- as long as everyone knew their place in the social order -- and they thought that made them "good," and certainly morally superior to the crude "white trash" around them. But they failed to understand that violent KKK-style racism was merely the pus at the top of a deep infection in American society -- not just Southern society, because if this book had been published in 1957 you'd have had an awful lot of people in the North and West nodding along with Uncle Jack and Atticus and saying "damn right!" I suspect you'd find a lot of people *today* agreeing with them more than they'd disagree, which just shows that infection is still a long way from being healed.

I think that's probably the main reason why this book wasn't published in 1957. The America of 1957 wasn't ready to face those truths about itself. It's much easier to fight racism if you look at it as an individual failing rather than a systemic disease -- if it's just a matter of sending in the National Guard to bring Orval Faubus into line, if it's just a matter of Atticus Finch standing up in TKAM to defend Tom Robinson because it was the *right thing to do*, it's much easier to look ahead to a time when the problem will be solved. Atticus himself sums it up best. "Men carry their honesty in pigeonholes," he tells Jean Louise. "They can be perfectly honest in some ways, and fool themselves in others."

 

[Fading Fast]

As I was reading Lizzie's insightful review, a thought went through my mind that has been germinating in that not-fertile soil since I read "Go Set a Watchman."

The discovery of the manuscript got enormous press and attention, the upcoming publication the same, then when - and IMHO this is the trigger - we learned that Atticus Finch was a a segregationist, there was a brief fury of outrage and, then, nothing - silence, crickets.

I think the "nothing," the silence, the no further discussion, the no more media coverage that followed the brief fury is because, as Lizzie noted, people don't want to give up their illusion, their hero, "their" Atticus Finch. An entire generation - a generation now writing reviews, editing literary news coverage, etc. - grew up with Atticus Finch as a moral hero. He did it all right, had all the right beliefs, stood up to all the ugly racism and narrow-mindedness and did it with grace and humility and courage and character.

My guess is people are angry that their hero was taken from them and simply don't want to hear it or talk about it. I understand this as I felt and feel it to - Atticus Finch was my hero since (I think) eight grade when I first read "To Kill a Mockingbird" and that hero worship was only reinforced with each watching of the movie (and a recent reread of the book). I was angry, but so what - I find the broader context of Atticus Finch (that Lizzie insightfully discusses above), his three-dimensional character, his man-of-his-time limitations all incredibly challenging and fascinating and real.

I don't know any Atticus Finches from TKAM in my life, but I know many Atticus Finches from GSAW - I don't mean segregationists - I mean good moral people, who do good moral things, but have views on this or that subject that are complex owing to the time we live in, that reflect the moral controversies we debate publicly today.

Atticus Finch of TKAM got one thing very, very right and from that we extrapolated a moral perfection, a hero. I know people who today get some pretty big things right morally, but then get into the controversies we debate today - abortion, climate change, more / less government spending / taxes, immigration, etc. - and they are, like Atticus in his day, no longer a fountainhead of moral clarity, but real human beings with views that, probably, 50 years from now will either look like forward thinking or look narrow minded.

Atticus Finch of GSAW is an massive disappointment to the eighth grader in me, but a complex and interesting character to the adult I am. GSAW is a odd book (or, as Lizzie avers, more of a character study at a moment of awakening) with transition issues, pacing issues (the end feels very rushed) and other flaws. It is not a beautiful morality tale like TKAM - but it is a complex book that raises serious issues and provides an incredible window into how different people thought in the mid-1950s. I am sorry that the pain of loosing TKAM's Atticus Finch seems to have stifled the conversations we could be having about GSAW.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Atticus Finch of GSAW is an massive disappointment to the eighth grader in me, but a complex and interesting character to the adult I am. GSAW is a odd book (or, as Lizzie avers, more of a character study at a moment of awakening) with transition issues, pacing issues (the end feels very rushed) and other flaws. It is not a beautiful morality tale like TKAM - but it is a complex book that raises serious issues and provides an incredible window into how different people thought in the mid-1950s. I am sorry that the pain of loosing TKAM's Atticus Finch seems to have stifled the conversations we could be having about GSAW.

I think this is one big reason why literary heroes have such staying power --usually, they *can't* disappoint us the way actual flesh-and-blood heroes can and usually do. We will only ever know about them what the author chooses to tell us, and I think that's what made Attticus such an indelible hero -- up to now the only vision we ever had of him was thru the eyes of a six-year-old girl. Nobody ever views a hero with greater purity than a child, and nobody idealizes their heroes more completely than a child.

And to build a bit on your thoughts, I think the fact that Atticus was such a hero to Scout -- and by extension, to the "Scout" in all of us -- is what makes the public reaction to GSAW so remarkable. When, in recent memory, has there been any sort of comparable reaction to any literary character? It's not just disappointment that many people have expressed, it's disappointment underlined with a deep streak of betrayal. It's like the moment when you discovered there was no Santa Claus.

Probably some people who read TKAM as kids revisit it as adults realize that Scout's vision of her father is too good to be true. He was a middle-aged white Southerner in the 1930s, an era when the only white-dominated organization to take an uncompromising stand for absolute racial equality was the Communist Party USA, and even the Atticus of TKAM would have had no truck with them. But Scout didn't know about that, and she wouldn't have accepted it if she did. Her dad was a good man in her eyes, and good men to a six year old are good down to their bones. If you accept GSAW as a canonical sequel to TKAM, it's consistent with her character that she'd hold onto that belief into her twenties, which makes her loss of that last bit of childhood innocence so heartbreaking. And, sad to say, realistic.

 

[Fading Fast]

I think this is one big reason why literary heroes have such staying power --usually, they *can't* disappoint us the way actual flesh-and-blood heroes can and usually do. We will only ever know about them what the author chooses to tell us, and I think that's what made Attticus such an indelible hero -- up to now the only vision we ever had of him was thru the eyes of a six-year-old girl. Nobody ever views a hero with greater purity than a child, and nobody idealizes their heroes more completely than a child.

And to build a bit on your thoughts, I think the fact that Atticus was such a hero to Scout -- and by extension, to the "Scout" in all of us -- is what makes the public reaction to GSAW so remarkable. When, in recent memory, has there been any sort of comparable reaction to any literary character? It's not just disappointment that many people have expressed, it's disappointment underlined with a deep streak of betrayal. It's like the moment when you discovered there was no Santa Claus.

Probably some people who read TKAM as kids revisit it as adults realize that Scout's vision of her father is too good to be true. He was a middle-aged white Southerner in the 1930s, an era when the only white-dominated organization to take an uncompromising stand for absolute racial equality was the Communist Party USA, and even the Atticus of TKAM would have had no truck with them. But Scout didn't know about that, and she wouldn't have accepted it if she did. Her dad was a good man in her eyes, and good men to a six year old are good down to their bones. If you accept GSAW as a canonical sequel to TKAM, it's consistent with her character that she'd hold onto that belief into her twenties, which makes her loss of that last bit of childhood innocence so heartbreaking. And, sad to say, realistic.

Bolded above, which is also what makes it a powerful book as we all have lived Scout's pain in some way at some time and we live it anew when reading GSAW.

As an aside, as someone not raised with religion, I had no idea where the title of GSAW came from and thought it awkward when I first heard it. Then, when one learns (or, I'm sure, many already knew) that it is from Isaiah 21:6 -
For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.
it is powerful and, IMHO, the theme of the book.

As Harper Lee did with "To Kill a Mockingbird" she chose a resonating title to reflect and emphasize the theme of the book, but in a not obvious way. Kudos to her, the woman has real talent.

 

[Fading Fast]

...I think the fact that Atticus was such a hero to Scout -- and by extension, to the "Scout" in all of us -- is what makes the public reaction to GSAW so remarkable. When, in recent memory, has there been any sort of comparable reaction to any literary character? It's not just disappointment that many people have expressed, it's disappointment underlined with a deep streak of betrayal. It's like the moment when you discovered there was no Santa Claus. ...

I don't follow Superman today (loved him as a kid) - the comic books, the novels or even the movies - but I remember, at least a decade ago, there seemed to be a brouhaha over "The Death of Superman" which, if memory serves, was about him being killed off, I think, in either his comic book series or a novel. To Lizzie's point, that is probably the last time I remember a fictional (not quite literary - although some great allegorical references) character sparking such deep passions. Atticus Finch of TKAM was a moral superman, so maybe it makes sense that his moral death and Superman's actual death both raised such strong reactions in the public.