This piece is the second in a three-part series we’ll be publishing this week on Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman. Here’s the first installment.

You know about the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird, the two-part architecture: the Wordsworthian childhood sublime of Scout, Jem, and Dill, their summertime beguilement by Boo Radley, followed by Atticus Finch’s defense of the wrongly accused black man Tom Robinson. And you know about the rabid popularity: the novel’s pervasiveness in American middle and high schools, its still yearly robust sales figures, the one-time efforts to ban it—efforts that always achieve the inverse effect. Twain said it: the best way to catapult a book into best-sellerdom is to tell people they can’t have it. And as for that slur against Ms. Lee, “one-hit wonder”: most novelists are no-hit wonders.

The narration of Mockingbird belongs to the adult Jean Louise Finch; the eyes, however, belong wholly to the child Scout. Jean Louise Finch is consistently shrewd: “I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen”—with that sentence and others, you see you aren’t dealing with an obedient and blindly pious Southern woman. And Scout: the ceaseless charisma and comedic lean of that little girl. I imagine every reader must have his Scout moment, that satisfying click in the mind, the paragraph or line in which she does or says something, after which he is helplessly hers: He’ll follow her not only to the end of her book but to the end of the earth. For me it happens in chapter seven (a bit later than most, maybe): “The second grade was grim.”

An unsigned Time magazine review in 1960 saw that “Lee’s prose has an edge that cuts through cant,” and that’s well put. Mockingbird is rich with fluvial prose: “The night-crawlers had retired, but ripe chinaberries drummed on the roof when the wind stirred, and the darkness was desolate with the barking of distant dogs.” See the expertly placed and surprising adverb here: “The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard.” Notice the near onomatopoetic richness of this line: “We bounded down the sidewalk on a spree of sheer relief, leaping and howling.” For a novel of almost 400 pages, it’s blessedly inoculated against common prose germs. There is only the occasional cough of cliché: “snow white,” “ramrod straight,” “blaze of glory.” As some novelists know better than others, keeping paragraphs free of knee-jerk jargon and toneless formulations is the work of round-the-clock vigilance, and Harper Lee has always deserved more applause for the stride of her style.

You won’t find much literary comment on Mockingbird, and what does exist doesn’t much care about how Lee carpenters her prose. A smattering of early critics and reviewers were irked by the plot’s bifurcation. The New York Herald Tribune complained: “The charm and wistful humor of the childhood recollections do not foreshadow the deeper, harsher note which pervades the later pages of the book.” That goes out of its way to miss the point, since the first act of the novel is the crucial imaginative prelude to the moral reckoning of the second act: The childhood sublime must be celebrated if its later defacing by adulthood horrors, its asphyxiation by injustice and race hatred, is to have any effect.

Curiously, those most qualified to comment upon Mockingbird chose not to do so.

Since the appearance of Mockingbird in 1960, some have had a hard time taking it seriously. In a letter to a friend in October of that year, Flannery O’Connor had this to say: “For a child’s book it does all right. It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is.” I’m loath ever to be at odds with Ms. O’Connor, but I’ve got to say: Those lines hit my ear as distinctly bitter. The one word that shows her hand? Buying.