“To Kill A Mockingbird” is one of those novels that history dictates should have been thrown aside and collecting dust about 10 years after it was written. The author was a former librarian, it was the only book she’d ever written, and the subject matter had been discussed time and time again.
I knew all of these things, opening the book for the first time since my junior year in high school. I was thoroughly convinced I couldn’t learn anything new from Harper Lee, Jem, Scout, or Atticus.
I was wrong.
Not only did my junior year consist of SparkNotes for this book and regurgitating the condensed versions I’d seen about five minutes before on my smartphone for any given test, I’d never really gotten a chance to get invested in the characters. Heck, we watched the movie and about five minutes into it the bell rang for our next class. So I didn’t get to see anything I’d missed, either. I was upset for all of 5 seconds, back then. I’m more upset now.
Rereading the novel, I could see how well it was written. There are phrases I encounter, every now and again, that make me envious of Harper Lee. I fume for a couple seconds, the goosebumps covering my arms like silk opera gloves, and wonder why I didn’t think of that sentence, that wording, that order.
What comes to mind more than anything while reading this classic, though, is the reverence now given to works that don’t deserve the word.
Two examples come to mind: Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series and Donald Barthelme’s “Snow White” retelling. Stephenie Meyer is up there for obvious reasons; the writing is clearly evident of a flagrant abuse of Microsoft Word’s thesaurus function, the characters are flat and uninteresting, and the romance story’s ultimate physical intimacy is told with all of the passion of an IKEA manual. Barthelme’s book is on the other extreme; it’s well-written as a postmodernist satire using the seven dwarves as psychological entities, but ending the entire book with a series of capitalized bolded Arial lines that include “The victimization of Snow White’s arse/ The apotheosis of Snow White” reeks of pretentiousness. I find it to be an anathematization of simplicity and straightforward storytelling.
TKAM had none of this. The story was told with the sincerity and directness of a child, fitting perfectly with the narrative voice. Racism wasn’t something Scout understood, but nor was it something to which she was blind. She and Jem’s friendship with Boo Radley is an unusual one but it might be one of the most endearing in all of literature.
Knowing that your only tenuous grasp on the entirety of the outside world rests in the hands of a pair of children must be difficult for any normal person, and that’s why this book works: Boo isn’t normal – he understands the loyalty of kids and their dedication to purity.
Jem and Scout constantly seek for justice, even more than the adults do in the novel. The trial of Tom only highlights the idea that children seemingly know more than adults in some issues but at the same time are constantly learning. There’s a definite dichotomy between innocence and experience (a la William Blake), between clean and dirty, life and death as a metaphor for good and evil, and between – you guessed it – black and white. The racial tension in the book is the most obvious symbol, the most prevalent. But it never takes away from the coming-of-age story of Scout and Jem, growing up in Maycomb, Alabama.
Fantastic book, can’t wait to see what other characters in other works gain from experience.
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