![]() ![]() ![]() The twin themes of Go Set a Watchman are disillusion and nostalgia. Historical fiction, even when it’s set just a few decades back, has a tendency to congratulate the present for overcoming, or starting to ameliorate, the moral failings of the past. ![]() Moral clarity is harder to come by in fiction that dramatizes the present. And even if she had, I doubt it would have had the makings of a blockbuster book or a Hollywood film. Seeing the present, in the form of a novel, wasn’t a trick she’d mastered. ![]() If it was the clarity of a white savior, well, that’s the best you could find, or invent, in 1930s Alabama, when desegregation wasn’t yet on the horizon. Instead, to hear the publishers tell it, she traded the contemporary setting of Watchman, circa 1955, for the 1930s, and in writing To Kill a Mockingbird was able to tell a story of simple moral clarity. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.” These lines are delivered near the end of Harper Lee’s new lost-and-found book Go Set a Watchman, and they neatly explain why the book might have been better off lost. “Remember this also: it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. ![]()
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