Why this book: My reading group selected it to read and discuss. I had been wanting to re-read To Kill a Mockingbird for years, and selecting this book gave me the excuse to do so. I found it most interesting to read directly after re-reading Mockingbird.

My Impressions: Though I read several negative reviews of Go Set a Watchman, and I agree with some of the criticism I read, I liked the book and am very glad I read it. The review that I thought was most interesting was in the New Yorker and can be read at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/sweet-home-alabama. I agree with the author of that review that, had this not been Harper Lee, this book probably wouldn’t have been released as it was. It still needed much editing and restructuring to be a book worthy of Harper Lee. That said, it WAS Harper Lee, with the same wonderfully comfortable writing style. Especially just after finishing To Kill a Mockingbird, it was a joy to meet Scout and Atticus, and Aunt Alexandra, and a few of the other characters, 20 years later. I don’t think it would have been as good a read, had I not read Mockingbird first.

At least two friends told me they didn’t want to read Watchman  because they didn’t want it to sully their idealized image of Atticus Finch as the wise and courageous Ward-Cleaver-in-Alabama father-figure, since this book is reputed to portray Atticus as less ideal than he was in Mockingbird.  It is true that he is not revealed as a 21^st century enlightened egalitarian, but he is still a good and wise man –within his time and context.   Harper Lee reveals the recalcitrant South of the 1950’s, where most whites are still desperately holding on to the privileges and entitlements they felt were their due, simply by virtue of their race. This indeed is an important message of the book.   But I felt Watchman was really more about Scout growing up and maturing into Jean Louise, and that the issues of racism and bigotry in Maycomb were simply the context in which she was forced to choose between a path of love and wisdom, or to succumb to her own, different sort of “bigotry.”

The story takes place during a brief (two week) visit to Maycomb to visit her father and her (serious) boy friend Henry. Throughout the book, Jean Louise is torn between her nostalgia for the happy, secure world of her  childhood, and the voice of her “modern” sensibilities, revealing to her (again) the backward and unreconstructed side of Maycomb, Alabama. The freedom and worldliness she brings to Maycomb are not understood, nor welcomed by most of those still living in the post-reconstruction South.

I really enjoyed a number of the fascinating characters in this book and I would have loved for Harper Lee to have further developed them, so that I could have gotten to know them better and enjoy them that much more.    I truly enjoyed getting to know the central figure of the book – the intelligent, struggling, sensitive, and righteous Jean Louise Finch. So much energy and idealism, so much love, so much confusion and angst!  Harper Lee left us guessing what the next steps might be on the trajectory of her life.

Aunt Alexandra, Atticus’s sister, almost a caricature of conventional morality, was again, as in Mockingbird, a fascinating archtype. “She was the last of her kind: she had river-boat, boarding shcoool manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was a disapprover; she was an incurable gossip.” And as in Mockingbird, at the end, though we may not have liked nor agreed with her, we came to respect and perhaps even admire her.

Replacing Atticus as the main voice of morality in this book is his brother,  Uncle Jack Finch, the Doctor who “would unwind the reel of his strange lore to reveal reasoning that glittered with a private light of its own.”   Uncle Jack pointed out that, “Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”  It was Uncle Jack to whom Jean Louise turned when her world came crashing down.

And her boyfriend/fiance Henry, the Maycomb Kiwanis Club’s Man of the Year, a practicing attorney, Atticus’ protégé, striving for respectability in Maycomb, to overcome being considered “white trash” in his youth, based only on his parentage.   I liked and respected Henry, while also accepting some of Jean Louise’s accusations against him.

The theme, the setting and the writing are wonderful. What detracted from the book was that it does not flow smoothly and is not well laid out.  Watchman struggles to get its footing during the first half, and digresses into long retrospectives from Jean Louise’s childhood as Scout. Then suddenly, we are brought back to Jean Louise’s visit to Maycomb as an adult. Other than being nostalgic interludes for fans of Mockingbird, it wasn’t altogether clear to me the purpose of several of these retrospective vignettes.

There is however one long amusing digression into her teenage years, when she attended her first high school prom as a 15 year old. She didn’t want to go as the “Tom Boy” she was – and wanted this dance to be her coming out as a woman. In order to better fill out her newly purchased gown, she enhanced her figure with “falsies” (a term I haven’t heard since junior high school!) which, at a most inopportune time and manner, shifted out of place, leading to more embarassing and amusing results.

I felt that the main theme of the book stood on its own without the nostalgic references to Jean Louise’s To Kill a Mockingbird childhood.  How Jean Louise’s perspectives  had changed after leaving Maycomb, the righteous indignation with which she reacted to what was going on in her home town, her shock and disappointment at finding that people she loved and trusted were somehow associated with a reactionary movement, and then her eventual maturing and coming to terms with it, were enough to make the book a very worthwhile and fascinating read.

Why the title “Go Set a Watchman?”

A somewhat confused and unsettled Jean Louise thinking to herself after facing the prejudices and narrow perspectives of her former friends and school-mates: “I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour on the hour. I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says, but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference.”  Separately and later, Uncle Jack Finch tells her, “Everyman’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscience.”

Go Set a Watchman is about adapting to a changing world and understanding and loving people who are imperfect and see things differently than oneself. It is a wise and loving morality tale, written in Harper Lee’s beautiful prose. Though it could have been better structured and edited, I liked it and recommend it.