Showing posts with label Harper Lee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harper Lee. Show all posts

Saturday, July 18, 2015

To Kill a Mockingbird - And Revitalize a Brand



My original review of To Kill a Mockingbird

Updated review: It was all a dream, Atticus NEVER read Word Up Magazine.

 So in case you haven't heard, and of course you have, Harper Lee has a "new" book out.  It reads as a sequel to her classic 'To Kill a Mockingbird', showing us an adult Scout and a very much changed Atticus. The lawyer with a heart of gold who championed the cause of justice in a racist society is now a bitter, garden variety bigot. You probably also already know that Go Set a Watchman was not written as a sequel to Mockingbird, but is actually its first draft.  At editorial suggestion Harper Lee focused on a flashback to Scout's childhood, and from that piece of advice the book we all read in school was born.

 Harper Lee famously said that she did not want to publish another book. So why at age 89 would she decide to let Mockingbird's first draft be published as a book in its own right after the missing manuscript was supposedly discovered by her lawyer?  Your guess is as good as mine.  The purpose of this post is not conjecture about whether Harper Lee had a late in life change of heart or is being taken advantage of by a publishing giant.  Let others shout "Liar Liar - pants on fire" if they wish.  I'll buy this version of the story until/unless someone proves it to be false: From Mockingbird to Watchman

 And perhaps there is more to come, for here is A New Account of ‘Watchman’s’ Origin and Hints of a Third Book



Some readers are conflicted:




But perhaps we should simply read Watchman and judge it on its own merits. Doing so without comparison to Mockingbird is of course pretty much impossible. Harper Lee's 'Watchman' Is A Mess That Makes Us Reconsider A Masterpiece

Not that this is preventing it from selling like hotcakes. Go Set a Watchman Breaks Book Selling Records

The release of Watchman has people re-examining Mockingbird with new eyes. In the #BlackLivesMatter era does Atticus Finch still come across as a civil rights hero?












It's also tough to think about Mockingbird the book without comparing it to Mockingbird the movie.











A search for more hidden gems may now be underway as result of the discovery of Watchman:






LOL













Chapter One of Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

My review of Go Set a Watchman:

Go Set a Watchman (To Kill a Mockingbird, #2)Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"I looked up to you, Atticus, like I never looked up to anybody in my life and never will again. If you had only given me some hint, if you had only broken your word with me a couple of times, if you had been bad-tempered or impatient with me---if you had been a lesser man, maybe I could have taken what I saw you doing. If once or twice you'd let me catch you doing something vile, then I would have understood yesterday. Then I'd have said that's just His Way, that's My Old Man, because I'd have been prepared for it somewhere along the line."

The words above are spoken to Atticus by his daughter Scout towards the end of Go Set a Watchman. They basically sum up the entire book. As you may already know, or in case you didn't until landing upon this review, Go Set a Watchman features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird quite a few years later. Jean Louise (aka Scout) is now a grown woman contemplating marriage to Henry, whom she has known since childhood. Henry has remained in their hometown of Maycomb, Alabama and followed the footsteps of Atticus into the law profession. If Scout wishes to marry a father figure, she's all set. Yet apparently she wants more out of life than Maycomb has to offer, because she now lives in New York City, which is about as different from the small southern town she grew up in as a planet in another galaxy. Maycomb holds many ties on her though. The narrative of Go Set a Watchman takes place during a visit to the place where her identity was formed in the earliest of her 26 years.

Much has changed in America from the years Mockingbird are set in to the 1950's. A considerable amount of the change has to do with race relations. People who were once blatant bigots continue to be so. Some things never change. But those who were closet bigots with enough good manners not to let it show in polite society now feel free to express hostility openly. Turns out they were only able to give the appearance of open minded respect for their fellow man when scales of opportunity were tilted heavily in their favor. As the scales became more balanced, the truth beneath southern hospitality was revealed. Count Henry and even our hero Atticus among those in Maycomb more willing to hear out the KKK than the NAACP. Changing times to them means time to put up a more aggressive fight against progress.

Amazingly Scout has been clueless about her father's true social/political views until he is about 70 years old. Once she is finally in the know, of course she feels betrayed. Her father was a lie. Her childhood was a lie. Her life has been a giant deception and she must get through the devastation and figure out how to come to terms with this.

I did not like Go Set a Watchman much. Not enough happening in the plot (no cool subplot like the one Boo Radley presented in Mockingbird). Too many long speeches that did not ring true to how people speak off the page of a novel. A domestic violence scene (I realize this was a far different time than 2016 but still) that was jarring and felt unnecessary and plain weird to me. Last but not least, I just didn't buy that it would take an intelligent woman so long to obtain an inkling of how the people closest to her feel about topics of such importance to her. It's not as if anybody was trying to hide anything from her. But somehow she only saw nobility in her father without catching a whiff of the stench of the rotten core that lay beneath his principles. Those of us who read To Kill a Mockingbird and/or saw the movie adaptation were also duped. This isn't the Atticus we thought we knew. How had that guy actually been this guy all along? Did we not read the book closely enough, all subtext going over our head? Or was Atticus given a complete personality transplant, which means not only did Atticus betray Scout, but Harper Lee betrayed us?

I could choose to contemplate Watchman in a vacuum, pretending I have no awareness of Mockingbird, that I'm meeting these characters and examining their motives for the very first time. If I do, I don't think it changes my opinions much. I still see the same flaws regarding lack of an attention holding plot, too many wandering speeches, etc. Sense of betrayal would be lessened, but I would still find it odd that it took Scout so long to finally wander into a room and learn what type of people she has been surrounded by her entire life.

Maybe that last part is unfair of me. After all, I know a thing or two about racist views remaining undetectable for a long period of time until the right situation brings them out from hiding. I've known parents who showed no overt sign of bigotry until their child became romantically involved with someone of another race. Prior to then, from their words and deeds and even choice of friends, few if any clues of intolerance were given.

There are things we don't know about those who are closest to us. There are things we don't yet know about ourselves because the circumstances to unearth them still lay in the future. There are cowards who believe they are brave, timid people who don't realize their potential to be adventurers, and friends who do not yet know that they consider you to be their enemy.

Unintentional deception is an intriguing premise for a novel. I don't feel that Go Set a Watchman examined it particularly well, but merely brushed up against the surface. I suppose that's why Lee's editor advised her to put Watchman aside and craft a new book based on an incident referenced in what turned out to be a first draft several decades before emerging as a sequel. That sound piece of advice (or so the legend goes) led to the creation of the vastly superior To Kill a Mockingbird.

Then again, perhaps the beloved Atticus Finch of the time tested Mockingbird is simply too good to be true. Maybe Atticus of Watchman is the more realistic depiction of a flesh and blood man, because the fact that he is a hypocrite is made plain. The shattering of illusions we depended on always goes down hard.

View all my reviews


p.s. Turns out there are way more than #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter

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Friday, October 8, 2010

Book Review - SOUTH OF BROAD by Pat Conroy




A lifetime of avid reading has brought many surprises my way ranging from mildly pleasant to absolutely thrilling. On occasion the pendulum swings in the other direction and I find myself disappointed by a book that did not live up to the lofty expectations I held for it. Great reviews, prestigious literary awards, and electrifying word of mouth are among the things that cause me to open a book with anticipation that my proverbial socks are about to be knocked off. But more than any of these factors, I tend to expect the best of books by authors who have wowed me with their prior efforts. I’m well aware that past success does not guarantee similar accomplisment in the future. Perhaps more so than any other endeavor, duplicating greatness time and time again is most difficult with the writing of fiction. When you see Kobe Bryant score 60 points in a game you expect that he’ll play spectacularly the next time out. Nine times out of ten he’ll do just that. He may not score 60, perhaps will only reach half that total. Thirty points is not nearly as impressive as sixty, but it’s still a damn fine effort. Great athletes tend to be consistent with the flaunting of their talent, and the same can be said of many other vocations. But when you look over the career arc of a prolific novelist, you’ll sometimes find that your favorite and least favorite books by them are oceans apart. You may find yourself wondering if the same person could have possibly written both books, particularly when they are published in the same decade. The weight of expectations from a highly successful novel can cripple an author, preventing future efforts that they fear (and rightfully so) will not live up to the reputation of its predecessor. Harper Lee is the ultimate example of this, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her first (and last) novel – To Kill a Mockingbird. We also have Margaret Mitchell who wrote the blockbuster Gone with the Wind and followed it up with…zilch, nada, nothing. Neither of them weakened their legacies with substantially weaker follow-ups to their signature works, but I’m sure they left many bummed readers hungry for more.

Up until recently the sharpest drop off I’ve experienced in enjoyment of novels by the same author would be the peak of John Irving’s The World According to Garp to the valley of his A Son of the Circus. Garp is not a very easy book to live up to, but Mr. Irving has managed to come pretty close over the course of his stellar career with brilliant works such as The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany. So he is easily forgiven by me for efforts that I find less impressive, especially since his worst is still better than many writers’ best.

Pat Conroy is an author who has dazzled me with the gift of his prose in the past. The Prince of Tides was a revelation. Like his other books The Great Santini and The Lords of Discipline, it was made into pretty good movie. So I dove into his latest novel, South of Broad, prepared to be floored. But this was not to be. Although the lushness of his prose when describing his beloved South Carolina continues to be on full display (various other setting elements are carried over from his previous writings as well), I did not find myself to be nearly as invested in the characters who populate South of Broad as I was in those brought to life in The Prince of Tides. Rather than feeling I was getting to know new people intimately, which is what the best of fiction does, it seemed to me that Mr. Conroy merely presented a lineup of caricatures this time out. Each of them was a specific type who spoke and acted according to predetermined dictates. The book is full of melodramatic events, and this sentence may be the greatest understatement I’ve ever made. Pretty much every tragedy other than the holocaust happens to these characters. Incestuous rape, abandoned orphans, stalking by pscho killer, flaunting of extramarital affairs in faces of spouses, suicide, AIDS, caught in a hurricane, victim of pedophile priest - you name it, this book has it. And I’d be happy to consider all of this to be a plausible series of events among a small group of friends so long as I did not feel the majority of them were cardboard cut outs rather than real people. Pat Conroy appears to be going through the motions when it comes to developing them, far more interested in putting them through the roller coaster pace of his plot while paying homage to the beauty of Charleston every few pages. There is a gay male character who perhaps literally is not given a single line of dialogue that is not sexual in nature. We get it, Pat, he’s gay. Gay people talk about more than just the fact that they’re gay, you know. The movie star is a self involved diva from beginning to end, always performing for her friends and for Conroy's readers rather than simply being a human being from time to time. The snob is a snob in all he says and does. How he doesn’t manage to permanently alienate himself from a group of people he considers himself to be far superior to is beyond me. Why he continues hanging out with people he barely finds worthy to wash his car is beyond me. Pat Conroy wrote that they will remain in each others lives for the sake of the storyline, so they do. The African American characters are noble and overachieving from beginning to end, no flaws other than an inability to tell the snob to go screw himself when he says something racist. One of the orphans becomes an upstanding citizen, the other goes crazy for no particular reason to be gleaned other than that at least 50% of those with screwed up childhoods surely will go on to become screwed up adults. The protagonist is the one character we get to know a little, although he is remarkably unemotional and reacts to pretty much everything with a flip comment. His specialty is always having a joke at the ready, delivered with a straight face. His father is a saint, his mother a bitch except for when she’s being a nun, and Toad somehow ends up as a gossip columnist who every now and then reacts to tragedy by being admitted to a mental institution when he can’t come up with a punchline. We see these characters at two points, when Toad and his friends are in high school, then years later when they go on a rescue mission to San Francisco for a couple weeks and then return to the greatest place on earth - South Carolina [Sure the south has its bigotry and rigid class distinctions separating bluebloods from the riffraff, but it’s also really really pretty]. In between these two points they have married off in pairs, sort of like the TV show Friends. Poor Toad gets the crazy one because it's his lot in life to catch bad breaks. He also lusts after the one who marries the snob because it's her destiny to be Mrs. Snob.

In Conroy’s latest effort I found far too much reader manipulation for my taste, a soap opera rather than Masterpiece Theater. Am I being harsher on this book than it deserves? I’m not sure. Perhaps if I did not come in as such a big fan of The Prince of Tides I would have given it more leeway. But regardless of how I feel about an author’s previous work in instances when I’ve read it, I can still recognize heavy handedness when I see it. I’m able to notice when an author is taking short cuts to draw emotion rather than carefully building tension, can spot border line absurd dialogue in place of what feels more natural for people to say, am capable of detecting paper thin character development when it’s evident. All of this was discovered in South of Broad. Pat Conroy’s sheer talent at constructing sentences got me to keep on pushing through to the end, and the novel's final 50 pages or so are probably the strongest. I think this is because Conroy was just about done with his plot machinations (just a twist or two or three left), so most of the characters are dispensed with, sent to the backdrop of Toad’s life, allowing the reader to spend a little one on one time with him. When he doesn’t have anyone around to make inappropriate wisecracks to, we get an extended peek at Toad’s inner thoughts and he finally starts to become interesting just in time for the book to end. Pat Conroy is an enormous talent, but South of Broad is one of his off days in my humble opinion.


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