Review Roundup: Harper Lee's 'Complex' and 'Disappointing' GO SET A WATCHMAN - All the Reviews!

Harper Lee's newest book, GO SET A WATCHMAN, hit bookshelves on July 14 to mixed and mostly controversial reviews.

Let's see what the critics had to say:

Randall Kennedy, NY Times: Although "Go Set a Watchman" sporadically generates the literary force that has buoyed "To Kill a Mockingbird" for over half a century, the new novel is not nearly as gripping as the courtroom drama and coming-of-age story it eventually became. The first hundred pages are largely desultory, though they do create a sense of anticipation. Then Lee begins to introduce the reader to Jean Louise's discovery that Atticus and Henry have joined the White Citizens' Council. Her disappointment, which develops into anger, suggests an opportunity to explore a dense, rich, complicated subject: How should you deal with someone who has loved you unstintingly when you find out that this same person harbors ugly, dangerous social prejudices?

Maureen Corrigan, NPR Books: Go Set a Watchman is a troubling confusion of a novel, politically and artistically, beginning with its fishy origin story. Allegedly, it's a recently discovered first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, but I'm suspicious: It reads much more like a failed sequel. There are lots of dead patches in Go Set a Watchman, pages where we get long explanations of, say, the fine points of the Methodist worship service.

Natasha Trethewey, Washington Post: Although the novel covers at first some familiar ground with flashbacks, the momentum changes just over a third of the way through to focus on the crux of the contemporary story - contemporary in the era it was written - that we have not heard. Jean Louise is a grown-up tomboy contending with gender roles she is loath to accept, a would-be suitor, and a newfound disappointment with her father and his ideals rooted in the transformations wrought by adulthood and the burgeoning recognition of different worldviews.

David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times: How did Lee take the frame of this fiction and collapse it to create "To Kill a Mockingbird," finding a narrative fluency only hinted at within this draft? How did she refine her language, her scene construction, discover a way to enlarge what are here little more than political and social commonplaces, to expose a universal human core? Regardless of the answers, "Go Set a Watchman" shows where she began. It is a starker book than "To Kill a Mockingbird," more reactive to its moment; a common theme involves what its characters regard as the overreach of the U.S. Supreme Court, which at the time Lee was writing had recently ruled on school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Lucy Scholes, BBC: It lacks the drama of Mockingbird's famous set pieces, relies a little too heavily on overly lengthy lectures about race and politics, and simply doesn't invite the same love for its characters (despite our familiarity with most of them). Lee's editors made the right call when they suggested she abandon this first draft and turn her attention to Scout's childhood. Despite being written in the less immediate and inviting third person, there are flashbacks to this time aplenty in Watchman, enough to convince that it's here that the real story lies, especially when told through the innocent eyes of a child. This, of course, is precisely where the genius of Mockingbird lies; it teaches the injustices of racial inequality through the prism of a different set of black-and-white absolutes: a child's clear-cut sense of right and wrong, fairness and unfairness.

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal: But the anticipation has somewhat obscured the awkward details about "Go Set a Watchman," as the novel is called (the title comes from the Book of Isaiah). Although it is set in the mid-1950s, around 20 years after "To Kill a Mockingbird," it is not a sequel. Ms. Lee, who is now 89, wrote it first, submitted it to a publisher in 1957 and, on an editor's advice, refashioned it into the book that's now assigned in grade schools all over the country. Properly speaking, "Go Set a Watchman" is a practice run for "To Kill a Mockingbird," and it existed before anybody could have known that small-town Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch would become a symbol of the nation's moral conscience.

Mark Lawson, The Guardian: A few passages exactly overlap between the two books, principally scene-setters describing Maycomb, Alabamian history and local folklore such as the comical legal consequences of the intermarriage of the Cunningham and Coningham clans. A handful of paragraphs alluding to the Robinson rape case in the 1930s (though with one crucial detail changed) were expanded to hundreds of pages in To Kill a Mockingbird. Encountering these seed sentences, it is hard not to feel some awe at the literary midwives who spotted, in the original conception, the greater literary sibling that existed in embryo. If the text now published had been the one released in 1960, it would almost certainly not have achieved the same greatness.

Gaby Wood, The Telegraph: What's more, there is a crucial discrepancy in plot terms - which Lee's editors have said she specifically did not wish to correct. In a flashback to the central court case in To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus is said to have "won acquittal for a coloured boy on a rape charge". The message of To Kill a Mockingbird - in which Atticus's innocent client, Tom Robinson, is convicted by the jury - was that individuals must behave honourably, even if societies can't change overnight. In Go Set a Watchman, society finds Tom Robinson innocent; yet the individual who defended him is shown to be full of prejudice.

Arifa Akbar, The Independent: It is not a finely written story - this reads as a 'good' first draft which Lee has refused to rework - yet even in its coarse state where scenes are sketchy, third-person narration shifts haphazardly and leaden lectures on the Southern States' racial history stand-in for convincing dialogue - it is the more radical, ambitious and politicised of the two novels Lee has now published.

Daniel D'Addario, Time: Watchman is alienating from the very start: Readers will be dispirited from the first chapter, with the revelation that, in the years between Scout's childhood and her return to Maycomb, Ala., at 26, her brother Jem has died and her father Atticus has grown infirm. This burst of exposition, as with other clumsy moments of plotting and sporadic jumps back in time, works only because the characters are already famous; a romance between Jean Louise (Scout has embraced her legal name as an adult) and a newly introduced character, Henry Clinton, told in a third-person voice close to Jean Louise's own thoughts, is less successful yet.

To post a comment, you must register and login.