(Originally Published September 22, 2015)

I'm reading through Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, and I'm troubled.

It isn't that the book is bad, far from it. It is unpolished, sure. It segues into first person narrative with some regularity, something I find discomforting, having become so familiar with Lee's Mockingbird prose. It has a tendency to lack some of the vibrant imagery that set scenes and created character in the earlier work. The breaks of part and chapter do not seem to have the same delicate intention of the previous work either.

While these things I find distracting, what troubles me is that I think I might enjoy this book more than To Kill a Mockingbird.

In no way do I think it is a better book. For the above reasons and more, I do not think it is written as well, but I enjoy the honesty of Watchman in a way that surprises me.

I loved Mockingbird. Atticus is a phenomenal character, the interactions and growth of the novel's children feel authentic and consequential, and Cal bridges a racial gap that is simultaneously hopeful and sad, she being a testament to the goodness and patience of a people whose goodness and patience were both assumed and - more often than not - wasted by whites. But in these characters, these conflicts, these contexts, I have sometimes struggled. The poor whites of Mockingbird were easy bad guys. The casual (and sometimes overt) racism of the town felt representative without being dangerous. The innocent, simple Tom was impossible not to empathize with. The hero, Atticus, a clear icon of a some idealistic civil rights-era whites.

All of these things make it really easy to see the issues of racial injustice in a stark, simple binary. Justice good / Racism bad. This binary is created in a way that is not particularly challenging to white culture. Whites get to identify with Atticus as a figure for white goodness, while also getting to despise Bob Ewell, doing so with blacks who would so easily recognize his evil. Whites, however, are cheering for a white man to improve the problems of racism. Could a black reader champion this solution? Could he or she look at Atticus and think "I wish there were more white people trying to fix things for me!"

Essentially, Mockingbird white-washes racial and social injustice in a supremely problematic way. It is a beautiful book, it is a story well told, but it does an injustice to a great social burden.

Go Set a Watchmen is decidedly more honest. There are few paragons of virtue here. Atticus, and all of white Maycomb (pretty much), is pro-segregation, sees the NAACP as a bunch of black trouble-makers (a problem that still exists today), and feels slighted that blacks aren't more thankful for the good nature whites have shown them in the past. This perspective is abhorrent, but so startlingly honest that I almost resented it when I began reading. I was angry at Atticus as a I read. I was angry at Cal as I read.

Then I realized how fortunate I was to be angry. This is not a book that had an editor that smoothed down all the rough edges, who worked to craft a book that could sell copies. This book was always going to sell, and its author was well-past making improvements.

The book may have its flaws in terms of convention and method, but the retention of those flaws allowed beloved characters to retain faults whose presence had previously been denied to me, and for that I am thankful. I'm not happy about it, but I am appreciative.