Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

        

Like so many people, I have read To Kill a Mockingbird many times and loved it. While I was eager to read Go Set a Watchman, I was also a little trepidatious after reading a few strong, negative reviews.

These reviews brought up questions for me...How can any second book live up to such an amazing first book, especially if it is following the same main characters? What about the racial issues that some reviewers brought up? Is Atticus really a racist? Can it be so?

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus is a small town lawyer, widower and father of two young children, standing on justice to defend a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman. To Kill a Mockingbird is a morality tale, letting us know that fighting for what is right, even against incredible odds, is important. In To Kill a Mockingbird we love and respect Atticus for his strength and firm moral conviction.

His firm moral conviction against racism and prejudice, right?

Well...

Go Set a Watchman begins with Scout coming home to Maycomb County as an adult, just as the Supreme Court has ruled on Brown vs the Board of Education in 1954. Scout (Jean Louise), finds out that most of the people in her town, including Atticus, are not supportive of this ruling. Is it possible that Atticus Finch supports segregation?

This is not the Atticus we remembered.

This is not the Atticus that Jean Louise remembered either. Jean Louise revered Atticus. Yet here he is, supporting segregation. In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise struggles to understand how Atticus can disagree with this Supreme Court ruling and how he can believe what he does about race. She feels as though her world is being upended.

What is going on here?

Jean Louise is growing up.

Jean Louise is growing out of simplistic ways of thinking and discovering how complex people and issues are. She changes from thinking that Atticus is all-seeing, all-knowing, and infallible, into realizing that he is human and that he has flaws. Throughout Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise has to reconcile how she rememebered people from her childhood with the realities of how these same people are behaving in her present day. They aren't different people, she is just seeing them through more mature eyes.

I got more depth and insight into these characters than I did in To Kill a Mockingbird. When I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I, like Scout, saw Atticus as a paragon of justice and racial equality. It was an interesting experience to have loved and revered a fictional character so much and to notice how upset I was as I read Go Set a Watchman to discover how different Atticus was than I wanted him to be. Perhaps Go Set a Watchman is not a coming of age story just for Jean Louise. Perhaps it is one for us as well.

Well done.

Thanks for stopping by! If you haven't already gotten a copy of Go Set a Watchman, you can click on the book cover and get it from Powell's City of Books. Be sure and check out our Facebook page here: NOT The New York Times Book Review. You can also send us email using this address: 2of3Rs(AT)gmail(DOT)com.

Pandemics and Lesbians

Okay, so no pandemics and lesbians in the same book. I don't think.

I just finished reading Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.

Set in the late 1880's, written in 1998 , Nan, a young woman, finds herself attracted to a 'masher', a woman who dresses up like a man and sings and dances on stage.



Waters is a good story-teller. Nan, who is the narrator and main character, is believable and engaging. As the story begins, she lives with her family in Whitstable, serving oysters and fish in an oyster parlour. When she attends the theater and meets Kitty Butler, the masher, she describes her attraction..."When I see her, it's like - I don't know what it's like. It's like I never saw anything at all before. It's like I am filling up, like a wine-glass when it's filled with wine. I watch the acts before her and they are like nothing - they're like dust. Then she walks on stage and - she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet...She makes me want to smile and weep, at once."
And...
"I felt as if my admiration for Kitty Butler had lit a beacon inside me, and opening my unguarded mouth had sent a shaft of light into the darkened room, illuminating all."

At first Nan struggles with her own feelings, afraid that she is too attracted to Kitty. Through the rest of the novel (not to give too much away), she realizes that her attraction to women is who she is.

I liked that it was set in the 1880's, enjoying a glimpse into theater life in the late 19th century. And while Nan did struggle with her lesbian sexuality in a culture constrained by sexual mores, it seemed to me that the struggle might have been a bit harder. Nan seemed to find little enclaves where lesbians were welcomed. As I was reading, I wondered how true that much acceptance would have been in Victorian England.

Sarah Waters did something interesting, which I don't think I've seen before. She used her own last name as one of the character's last names in the book. Walter Waters wasn't the most major character, but he was not a tiny-show-up-on-one-page kind of character either. I wondered if she might have identified in some way with that character, however Sarah Waters identifies herself as a lesbian, and Walter Waters was most definitely a heterosexual man, so if she did identify with that character, the reasoning wasn't obvious to me.

In any case, I enjoyed it and was thrilled to read a well-written novel primarily about lesbians. I received this book through Bookcrossing and some of the people who had read it before described it as racy. I wondered if people thought it was racy because the novel described sex between women and perhaps these readers hadn't experienced that. There were descriptive, sexual scenes with women, which I found lovely.

My partner and I are both, coincidentally, reading books about pandemics (and if there are lesbians in the books, we haven't met them yet). She bought me The Things That Keep Us Here by Carla Buckley.

Centered around a family where the parents are divorcing, the book describes how the avian flu can become a pandemic and how they survive. (Okay, I don't know if they survive as I'm only a few chapters in, but I want to find out!)

Peter, the husband, is some sort of animal researcher. Early in the book he fills in for a professor friend and describes to a college class how a strain of avian flu can become a pandemic.

"That's what we're worried can happen with H5,: Peter corrected. "That's why WHO has issued alerts, why our health departments are stockpiling latex gloves, and why I'm freezing my butt off beside Sparrow Lake at five in the morning."
A ripple of laughter.
Someone called out, "Do you think we're going to have a pandemic?"
Peter regarded the young faces turned toward him. He thought of all those mute bobbing birds, felled by the same sharp blow. "What does science tell us?"
Silence. They were all thinking about this.
"Put yourself in the virus's place. If you had a good thing going, hooking up with everybody in town, would you move on?"
Nervous laughter.
"Of course you wouldn't. You'd hang around a slong as possible."
"So that means yes?"
"That means..." Peter reached over and shut off the projector. He faced the room. Every head was lifted, every pen stilled. "It's inevitable. Maybe not in my lifetime. Maybe not in yours or even your children's lifetimes. but sometime."

And my guess is that the pandemic will arrive sooner rather than later.

My partner is reading an advance copy of Justin Cronin's The Passage. A government project goes awry, causing a virus that changes people in a bad way.

Touted to be a cross between Stephen King's The Stand and Max Brooks's World War Z, this, they say, is supposed to be the book event of the summer. (I think they WANT it to be the book event of the summer.) Movie rights have already been sold, with Ridley Scott directing.