By all accounts, “Go Set a Watchman” has been doing really well. REALLY well. More than a million copies sold in the first week. Prior to “Watchman,” publishing house HarperCollins had never sold a book so fast. And it has ratcheted overnight to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.
But doing well is not the same as doing good. This book is a bad precedent.
To begin with, we all know why it is a sizzling-hot best seller.
Not because serious reading has been rediscovered as acceptable, societal escape. Not because we can never get enough Southern-bigotry chronicles. Not because it is so well written. No, it’s because “Watchman” is by the same author, Harper Lee, who wrote the iconic “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1960. Because there’s cash in cachet.
For two generations, “Mockingbird” has been revered and even labeled “our national novel” by Oprah Winfrey. It also became that rare sequel: a movie that did justice to a great book. In fact, so much justice that the movie itself has been prominently enshrined in America’s literary parthenon. In 2003 the American Film Institute voted protagonist Atticus Finch, indelibly played by Gregory Peck, the greatest hero in American film.
And for two generations, Atticus has been lionized as an idealized bulwark against racism. A principled attorney, father and role model who courageously defended a black man wrongly accused of rape in the segregated South of the 1930s. A reminder that even if the context is insidious racism, you can never preclude courage and sheer moral force, however unlikely.
Now there’s “Watchman,” a sheer money force that was written before “Mockingbird.” The chronology, the racial dynamics, the point of view and the level of sophistication are different.
Whereas “Mockingbird,” on merit, is a well-written classic, “Watchman,” by all accounts that matter, is not. That’s no Harper Lee slam, but an acknowledgement that work-in-progress drafts, by definition, are neither great nor grist for the publication mill. That’s why her back-in-the-day editor, Tay Hohoff, put her through the rewrite mill.
The critics be damned, however, when what turns up more than half a century later is another book by the one-and-done, famous author who never published another book.
The untimely, unfortunate upshot is that the possibly compromised legacy of Atticus Finch and Harper Lee, now an 89-year-old stroke victim living in nursing home, is in the hands of Rupert Murdoch-owned HarperCollins. Who, candidly, even knows if any of this has her valid consent?