Never has a book needed a ghost writer more than this newly published collection of anecdotes and flashbacks that spends the first hundred pages flailing around in search of a reason to exist.
The content, however, is rather interesting. First it’s important to realize this book is a rough-draft of a story that eventually turned into To Kill a Mockingbird. There a numerous subtle inconsistencies with the book it turned into. Having said that, it’s fun to read about Scout as an adult. In To Kill a Mockingbird she was a sort of idealized child, like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. Such creations aren’t realistic children, but they are the kind of children we wish were realistic. As a result seeing Scout as an adult with a career and a love life is weird but humanizing.
And that is probably the best thing about Go Set a Watchman, the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird are transformed from platonic ideals to normal people. It’s heartbreaking to see fallings out between Atticus, Calpurnia, and Scout because they have come to us through the decades as icons and saints. That’s also one reason why this book was probably never finished and published before. You can’t give Gregory Peck an Oscar and then reduce Atticus to something merely human.
One of the themes that strikes me most from To Kill a Mockingbird is how we are all stuck living together in the same world, and we have to find a way to get along: majorities, minorities, those who are “colorblind”, and even those who are racist. These themes are more fully explored in Go Set a Watchman, and probably more important as part of our contemporary dialogue than anything we read in To Kill a Mockingbird which is why I wish the book had was actually well written.
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