I can’t think of anything to say to them. She glanced down the long, low-ceilinged livingroom at the double row of women, women she had merely known all her life, and she could not talk to them five minutes without drying up stone dead.

But so extreme is her frustration with the whole setup that the narrator suddenly breaks into the first person: In her head she promptly divides these afternoon ladies up into groups: the Newlyweds and the Diaper Set, the Light Brigade and the Perennial Hopefuls. And the women who come calling are, to Jean Louise, aliens from the planet I-Never-Left-Alabama.Īs is her habit, Jean Louise is at first externally polite but internally judgmental. Jean Louise finds herself drafted into a “Coffee” organized by her aunt Alexandra. One scene in the novel will linger with me for a long time. Yet something is buried in there, I think, something worth knowing. Here Jean Louise, no longer going by Scout, is in a state of extreme doubt about the noble ideas the first book seemed to espouse.

It certainly also lacks the soft focus a childhood setting can impose, the author getting to hide in the innocence of her child. It has none of the elegant construction or unitary voice. We will likely never know how much the “original” manuscript was edited here, especially since it morphs at times into verbatim scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird itself. It meanders quite a bit long passages describing the south drag. Her take on the book mostly boiled down to surprise and displeasure at its depiction of the elderly Atticus Finch as quite racist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan prone to inveighing against civil rights organizations.īut then, like most of the reviewers, Kakutani deployed a number of rhetorical questions that gave a sense she hadn’t quite been able to put the surrounding circumstances aside: “How did a lumpy tale about a young woman’s grief over her discovery of her father’s bigoted views evolve into a classic coming-of-age story about two children and their devoted widower father?” Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker pointed out that the two Atticuses were actually quite congruent, exhibiting a particular kind of Southern liberal racism: “And so beneath Atticus’s style of enlightenment is a kind of bigotry that could not recognize itself as such at the time.”Īnyway, Atticus aside, the verdict was nearly unanimous that this book was a bad read.

Michiko Kakutani led the chorus of horrified reviewers in the New York Times. There seemed to be some idea that you could solve the mystery simply by interpreting the book, essentially a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. This investigative spirit – the conviction that something about all of this smelled bad – leaked into the reviews, which often had a sleuthing quality.

Harper lee books go set a watchman