Jean louise finch biography of abraham

A breathless media warned readers of Harper Lee’s new Go Set a Watchman that they would surely feel betrayed and scandalized by the transformation of Christ-like To Kill a Mockingbird hero Atticus Finch into a hypocrite whose late-in-life “black-is-black-and-white-is-white” attitude shift appears to be in total conflict with his prior high-minded beliefs.

But now, after months of anticipation, analysis, and often baseless predictions, the public can purchase Watchman, read it, reflect on it, and draw its own conclusions about the lives of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch and her noble father, Atticus, as portrayed in Lee’s two memoir-novels.

My conclusions? While Mockingbird is the story of Lee’s “coming of age” as a child, Watchman is the tale of her “coming of age” as a young woman — in the context of awakening to the ugly realities of race relations in Alabama during the 1930s and 1950s. Throughout the books’ 20-year timeline, Jean Louise manages never to backslide, as her color-blind eyes keep opening wider to the realities of African Americans’ struggle in the Deep South. Atticus also shows his own growth, but it’s been drowned out by those who have recoiled at having their long-held perceptions challenged.

First, some background.

In the avalanche of coverage leading up to the publication of Go Set a Watchman, the public learned that Lee’s “new” novel (written in 1957) had been delivered not at the behest of its now-elderly, nearly blind and deaf author. Rather, it came from her lawyer, Tonja Carter, who in the recent past had discovered the manuscript in a safe-deposit box. Upon reading it, Carter became 2015’s Indiana Jones; she’d found the Lost Ark!

Fueling the media frenzy was the advance word that Watchman was a tale about the beloved Mockingbird father-daughter du

If one thing should be made clear, Harper Lee’s long-awaited second novel “Go Set a Watchman” is not a sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

While a number of the same characters remain, the story is not a young person’s first-hand account of a singular event, as “Mockingbird” is. The point of view shifts from a story to a person, making “Watchman” a coming-of-age character study of the beloved protagonist, Jean Louise Finch.

At 26-years-old, Finch returns to Macomb on a vacation from her current residence in New York City. Over the course of a number of days and 300 pages, the reader will witness a deep physiological shift in the central character.   

“Now [Finch] was aware of a sharp apartness, a separation, not from Atticus and Henry merely. All of Macomb and Macomb County were leaving her as the hours passed and she automatically blamed herself,” Lee writes.  

Lee exposes Finch’s evolving world by drawing the reader into different plotlines regardless of their place on the story’s timeline. One minute the reader is sitting in the backseat of a car listening to a conversation between Finch and her longtime boyfriend Henry Clinton, and the next they’re watching a game among Jem, Scout and Dill.

Harper wants the reader to experience stories that take place in the distant past, recent past and present. These history lessons inform the reader and explain exactly how Macomb is changing. Each tale adds itself to an immense patchwork quilt that symbolizes small-town Southern life in the 1950s.  

Harper uses Finch’s familiar quick wit and new-found city-girl perspective to highlight the South’s peculiar society rituals. Her descriptions aren’t devoid of ridicule, but the narrator rarely condescends her hometown. Flashbacks often drip with nostalgia quintessenti

Harper Lee’s long awaited second novel takes its title from Isaiah 21:6: “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.”

The church in Maycomb where Jean Louise Finch returns, a young woman of 26, is where she hears these words, but not where she finds clear vision. As happens today in many churches, including where I preach, the Bible may speak to a listener entirely separate from where the sermon goes… and that’s fine. Sometimes it’s even better.

“Go Set a Watchman” is, to sum up my own reaction, a remarkable production of a first time novelist. Yes, I said this was Harper Lee’s second novel, as published. Apparently what we received this summer was her first full-length written fiction, of which Tay Hohoff, her editor in 1957, said “the spark of the true writer flashed in every line.”

That is a true statement. It is also true that Hohoff felt there was an even better book in Harper Lee, and led her through repeated drafts, which culminated three years later in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” What could confuse is that the earlier novel, published second, takes place later than the setting of the first.

I think many reviewers have over thought that complication. If “Go Set a Watchman” had come out ten years (or 20, or 30) after “Mockingbird,” and to be perfectly fair had received a bit more loving attention from a Tay Hohoff or other thoughtful editor in the last third or so, I think it would have been welcomed as a worthy and equally weighty follow-up. The two books together read well as a unit, something I wanted to do before writing anything about the one.

It had been a very long time since I’d read “Mockingbird,” and I was acutely aware of the presence of Gregory Peck and Mary Badham and Robert Duvall across the printed pages. The 1962 classic movie version of the story has, for many of us, swamped our recollections of the book.

I’d never tell you to forget the movie,

Scout Finch