from “Mockingbird”—but what effect could Lee have expected them to have on readers who don’t? Indeed, the book as a book barely makes sense if you don’t know “Mockingbird.” If “Watchman” is a first novel, even in draft, it is unlike any first novel this reader is aware of: very short on the kind of autobiographical single-mindedness that first novels usually present, and which “Mockingbird” is filled with, and very long on the kind of discursive matter that novelists will take up when their opinions begin to count. It is, I suppose, possible that Lee wrote it as we have it, and that her ingenious editor, setting an all-time record for editorial ingenuity, saw in a few paragraphs referring to the trial of a young black man the material for a masterpiece. But it would not be surprising if this novel turns out to be a revised version of an early draft, returned to later, with an eye to writing the “race novel” that elsewhere Harper Lee has mentioned as an ambition. (The manuscript might then have been put aside by the author as undramatic and too abstract.) It is sad, though, to think that the preoccupations of this book, however much they may intersect our own preoccupations of the moment, might eclipse her greater poetic talents, evident here, and so beautifully fulfilled in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” There is a genuine dramatic climax, worthy of the writer’s gifts, offered and then evaded in “Watchman.” In the book’s toughest scene, Scout goes to visit Calpurnia, the black woman who brought her and Jem up, with infiniteseeming love, after Atticus agreed to defend Cal’s grandson from a charge of manslaughter. Scout is heartbroken to find that her beloved mother figure is cautiously distanced from her: “Cal,” she cried, “Cal, Cal, Cal, what are you doing to me? What’s the matter? I’m your baby, have you forgotten me? Why are you shutting me out? What are you doing to me?” Calpurnia lifted her hands and brought them down softly on the arms of the rocker. Her face was a million tiny wrinkles, and her eyes were dim behind thick lenses. “What are you all doing to us?” she said.
Then Scout asks, “Did you hate us?,” and Calpurnia shakes her head no. This is credible. But the scene, and the book, would have been stronger if she hadn’t.
BRIEFLY NOTED INDEPENDENCE LOST, by Kathleen DuVal (Random House). This
intrepid history of the American Revolution shifts the focus from the rebellious thirteen colonies to the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi valley, where Native Americans, African slaves, and Spanish, French, and British colonials were fighting very different battles. Here, DuVal writes, the vision for the continent was one of “multiple empires and powerful Indian nations”; it was highly unlikely that the rebels would win, much less that what Thomas Jefferson termed their “empire of liberty” would later destroy an intricate array of economic alliances and territorial agreements. The rebels’ vision of independence came at the expense of others’. Its realization involved the erasure of one people and the enslavement of another, and was a disaster for women of all races. THE PAWNBROKER’S DAUGHTER,
by Maxine Kumin (Norton). Kumin, who died last year, began her career as a stifled housewife selling light verse to magazines, grew into a voice of confession and feminist dissent, and, finally, became Poet Laureate and an eminent New England nature writer. This memoir lingers on moments of private joy. The first half is dominated by courtship: Kumin’s husband, a soldier working on the Manhattan Project, wrote funny love letters from Los Alamos. Later, a prestigious awards banquet is recounted merely to explain the arrival of a dog, Rilke, in her life. Some of her political poems are reproduced here, their fierceness almost incongruous alongside descriptions of the charmed placidity of her farm.
A GOD IN RUINS, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown). Atkinson’s
previous novel, “Life After Life,” was built around an arresting narrative conceit: Ursula Todd, a young Englishwoman, repeatedly dies and starts her life again. This follow-up tracks Ursula’s younger brother, Teddy, a favorite son who flies an R.A.F. bomber during the Second World War and remains kind, thoughtful, and patient through a life of quiet sadness: he is widowed early, has a selfish daughter, and struggles to connect with his grandchildren. Teddy, unlike his sister, lives only one life, but Atkinson’s deft handling of time, as she jumps from boyhood to old age and back, is impressive. PORTRAIT OF A MAN KNOWN AS IL CONDOTTIERE, by Georges Perec, translated from the French by David Bellos (Chicago). This unpublished early novel by a famous French experimentalist is a youthful riff on Dostoyevsky and Poe. An art forger murders his dealer, in an act of existential despair, after failing to create a convincingly “authentic” Antonello da Messina painting, and spends most of the novel agonizing over the murder and his artistic shortcomings. Though the novel was originally rejected for “excessive clumsiness and chatter,” there are glimpses of Perec’s future greatness, as when he writes of the protagonist “transcending pastiche and reaching out beyond his subject and beyond his own intellectual grasp and ambition, finding only the murky ambiguity of his own self.” THE NEW YORKER, JULY 27, 2015
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