I had just finished To Kill a Mackingbird when Harper Lee died. I had never read it before. It is artfully written. I’m afraid Lee unflashy style has been mistaken for straight-talk, hence literature for people who don’t really like literature, but pieties dramatized.
And so then reading Go Set a Watchman was a pleasure. But it wasn't the pleasure of a good novel. The editor rejected the manuscript—rightly so—but suggested Lee do something with the childhood reminiscence sections. (From whence came Mockingbird).
Watchman is more ambitious than Mockingbird. Overly so: Lee was trying to write a gently satirical British village life novel, that dealt, at the same time, with the civil rights movement. It was too much. The two couldn't fuse. The closest analogy would be Trollope’s Barchester novels, but his comedy of High vs. Low church politics was trivia compared to desegregation. Sir Walter Scott might have been a better model, but Lee didn't want to go there.
Being a smart and conscientious writer, Lee realized her experiment was a failure and discarded it. Unfortunately the assistant of her sister/attorney/guardian knew about it, and, eight months after Alice Lee’s funeral, we have a New Novel by a Beloved Author.
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