Go Set a Watchman

This novel by Harper Lee succeeds on many levels, which makes the largely negative reaction it has received puzzling. It may be that by taking the "tin god" of Atticus Finch, as one character refers to him, down to earth, the book has committed a crime equivalent of telling a five-year-old that there is no Santa Claus. Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, who had "barnacled" her morality to her father's, gets a rude awakening on a trip home from New York when she learns that he attends white racists' meetings and thinks blacks are too primitive for self-government. This Finch, paradoxically, is consistent with the one in Mockingbird because that story was set in the 1930s, a time when blacks posed no threat to white power and he could magnanimously defend an obviously innocent man without fear of wider consequences. This story takes place in the 1950s after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which poses a very real threat to the kind of society that Finch wants to protect. Beyond the racial elements, there is a good deal of gentle humor, especially in Jean Louise's flashbacks to her childhood and adolescence.