The Booky Man: Too Cool A Mockingbird
Can a novel ever be too good … for its own good?
The book in question is Alabama writer Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill A Mockingbird. What serious reader does not know something about the book, its cast and crew, details about the 1962 movie, its associations with Truman Capote, etc.?
After nearly 50 years in print, Mockingbird is surely the most widely read work of fiction about race relations. A staple of the syllabus of high schools and universities all over the world, it still sells a million copies a year.
Harper Lee wrote of small-town life in a racially stratified mid-1930s South. Her story of a heroic father, lawyer Atticus Finch, and his children, Jem and the book’s unforgettable narrator, Scout, felt something like every rural Southerner’s memoir—at least when it came to the descriptions of everyday customs, colorful neighbors, and the sometimes tense/sometimes tender relationship of blacks and whites.
The book came out just 95 years after the end of the Civil War, when most Southerners lived in little towns like the one Lee called Maycomb, her stand-in for Monroeville. These were backwater places where white trash and noble heroes lived just blocks apart, where blacks and whites mingled more often and more intimately than they do today, even while terrible bigotry divided them.
The novel tells of the trial of Tom Robinson, a black laborer wrongly accused of raping a white woman, the ultimate taboo of the time. Lawyer Atticus Finch, assigned to defend Robinson, labors mightily to see that justice is done, despite the color lines, the inherent prejudice in Jim Crow courts, and the mounting scorn from the white community for his efforts.