12/16/2023 0 Comments To kill a mockingbird about![]() ![]() ![]() Curiously, those most qualified to comment upon Mockingbird chose not to do so. 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. A smattering of early critics and reviewers were irked by the plot’s bifurcation. You won’t find much literary comment on Mockingbird, and what does exist doesn’t much care about how Lee carpenters her prose. For me it happens in chapter seven (a bit later than most, maybe): “The second grade was grim.” 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. And Scout: the ceaseless charisma and comedic lean of that little girl. 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. The narration of Mockingbird belongs to the adult Jean Louise Finch the eyes, however, belong wholly to the child Scout. Lee, “one-hit wonder”: most novelists are no-hit wonders. Twain said it: the best way to catapult a book into best-sellerdom is to tell people they can’t have it. 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. 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. ![]() 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. ![]()
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