'Watchman': Is Atticus Finch a racist?

Jocelyn McClurg | USA TODAY

The photo of a youthful Harper Lee on the Go Set a Watchman jacket is revealing: It was taken in the 1950s, when she wrote this "new" novel, only the second ever published by the now 89-year-old author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Context is everything, and so it's important to know that Watchman was a first effort, set aside after Lee's editor urged her to turn instead to Scout Finch's Alabama childhood. An American masterpiece was born, one that has taught racial tolerance to generations, all while telling a whopping good story and giving the world Boo Radley.

So perhaps we should judge Go Set a Watchman (** out of four) gently. Is it a great or even very good novel? No. Does it have its charms? Definitely. It's also a time capsule of a troubled time in the South, as desegregation looms in the wake of Supreme Court rulings. Unlike Mockingbird, Watchman contains passages of deeply disturbing, overt racial slurs. These are not gratuitous, but they are still hard to read.

Watchman opens with Jean Louise (Scout's real name) returning home to visit Maycomb. She's now 26 and a liberal New Yorker, by Southern standards. Meeting her at the train station is Henry Clinton, described as a "lifelong friend." (He didn't make the cut in Mockingbird, no big loss.) Henry, a World War II vet, pops the question 10 pages in, but Jean Louise, as independent and rebellious as ever, doesn't think she's in love.

Her father Atticus Finch is now 72, and corseted Aunt Alexandra is still on the scene and judging everybody. The meandering early chapters of Watchman are appealing and often funny, going down as easy as a glass of cool lemonade, even if we miss Scout's irresistible first-person narration. (Watchman is written in the third person.)

Then Jean Louise makes a shocking discovery that turns her world and the book on its head: she finds a pamphlet on Atticus's table called The Black Plague. Soon after she sneaks into a Maycomb County Citizens' Council meeting, where a man named Grady O'Hanlon spews appalling anti-black vitriol. Henry and Atticus, council members, listen passively.

Jean Louise is made physically ill by what she hears. Is Atticus Finch, the noble hero of To Kill a Mockingbird, a racist?

Watchman (which goes on sale Tuesday) is the story of a young adult wrestling with hard truths about her family and her hometown, but it's distressing to see the great, saintly Atticus diminished. If you think of Watchman as a young writer's laboratory, however, it provides valuable insight into the generous, complex mind of one of America's most important authors.

As a novel, Watchman lacks Mockingbird's riveting courtroom drama, its page-turning pacing, its genius structure. Still, there are pleasures to be had, as we live through Scout's humorous adolescent misadventures (one involves falsies) in flashbacks.

The problematic Go Set a Watchman will be of tremendous fascination to future biographers, if ultimately a footnote to literary history. There will be great debate, now and for years to come, if the book should have been published. And many will say "No." Now you can decide.

Go Set a Watchman

By Harper Lee

Harper, 278 pp.

2 stars out of four