Then Jean Louise finds a booklet on her father’s desk, The Black Plague, the cover of which shows a drawing of “an anthropophagous Negro.” Incensed, she rushes off to the courthouse where Atticus and Henry are taking part in a citizens’ council meeting. Hidden in the balcony—you’ll be reminded of how the children sat in that very balcony during Tom Robinson’s trial in Mockingbird—she eavesdrops on a cataract of white-power propaganda, of which her father and sweetheart seem to approve. She then spends the rest of the book obnoxiously outraged, hysterically haranguing her father and her beau, flitting about with all the crusading zest of the holier-than-thou, the affectations of an adolescent who’s just discovered the idealism of social justice.

Just as she’s about to leave town for good, her Uncle Jack backhands her in the mouth and feeds her whiskey, and this, against everything you know about human behavior, brings Jean Louise Finch straight back to her senses. In an epic unloading of casuistry, both her father and Uncle Jack have convinced her that Maycomb’s new white-on-black animus isn’t really bigotry, just (white) citizens rightly concerned about their own heritage and not keen on Washington or the NAACP meddling in their self-governance. If you could further pollute Donald Trump with the blather of Ayn Rand, you’d have someone who looks a lot like the Atticus Finch of Go Set a Watchman.

Ponderous and lurching, haltingly confected, the novel plods along in search of a plot, tranquilizes you with vast fallow patches, with deadening dead zones, with onslaughts of cliché and dialogue made of pamphleteering monologue or else eye-rolling chitchat. You are confronted by entire pages of her Uncle Jack’s oracular babble, and you must machete through the bracken of listless, throw-away prose in order to get to a memorable turn of phrase. “Jean Louise smiled to herself” and “Jean Louise laughed aloud” and then “Jean Louise shook her head” before “Jean Louise’s eyebrows flickered.” Someone has “green envy,” and someone else “worked night and day,” while someone “dropped dead in his tracks” and someone else was “bored stiff.” Soon, “Henry looked at her” and then “she looked at him” and then “Hank stirred” before “she stirred.” Then “she bit her tongue” right before “she held her tongue.” Characters "raise" their "eyebrows" so often you have to question how their foreheads turned to trampolines. When Jean Louise gets upset, which is always, her “throat tightens,” and you wonder how she breathes through such frequent esophageal constriction. Some good prose survived the voyage from Watchman to Mockingbird—Aunt Alexandra’s corset “drew up her bosom to giddy heights”—and you turn pages praying to find more of it. Those prayers, like all prayers, aren’t answered.

For once, none of those flaws in the novel can be blamed on the author: She was learning how to write when she composed Watchman, and wasn’t able to ready this draft for publication. In the two and a half years it took her to turn this mess into To Kill a Mockingbird, she evolved beautifully as a stylist and storyteller, helped along by an astute editor. It’s impossible to believe that a sound Harper Lee wished for this thing to be published, impossible to believe that her sister-protector, Alice Lee, would have allowed it to happen. This befouling book does not come close to meeting the immoderate predictions of its publisher (a “masterpiece” that “will be revered for generations to come”). It should have been permitted to retain its quiet dignity boxed in the author's archives. The manuscript might have been mildly nourishing for future tweeds in search of tenure, but it should never have been expensively packaged, gaudily hyped, unscrupulously employed as chum to lure lovers of Mockingbird.