I am baffled that anyone could read this new book and assume that Harper Lee decided at the age of ~90 to publish a complete rewriting of her most famous character into a monster. I dunno why she created this manuscript in the first place, all those years ago.
My wife's favorite script of mine - and the one that is most dear to me - is a tale about a bunch of Achaemenid nomads whose existence is threatened by a team of Navy SEALs somehow trapped in the past and gone despotic after 20 years without resupply or contact. I wrote it as a Road Warrior film with horses and heroes. It got sent around back when I was at William Morris. Every exec who read it didn't give the first fuck about a bunch of "Iranians." They wanted the story about the Navy SEALs kicking Persian ass back in 400 BC. What would that look like? they wondered. "A total rout," I said. "Until they ran out of ammo, and then a total rout the other way." No, but you have your guys surviving for 20 years, they said. "Yeah, by not kicking ass very often and doing really boring political things," I said. "You're supposed to tell the interesting story. THIS IS THE INTERESTING STORY." Fast forward 9 months. Anyway. I had no interest in writing about Navy SEALs shooting up a bunch of Achaemenid Persians. That struck me as boring and stupid and after all, we had The Final Countdown back in the '80s. I had no interest in reading Rome Sweet Rome either - boring stupid final countdown yadda yadda. But I wasn't at all surprised when Adam Kolbrenner ended up selling Rome Sweet Rome to Warner Brothers - after all, I'd introduced him to Reddit. I was even less surprised when nothing ever came of it. It's entirely possible that Harper Lee, age 30 in 1956, chose to write a novel about her disillusionment with her father, her ambivalence towards the South, and her search for her place in the world. It's entirely possible that as a pure shit first draft she realized that her self-involvement was harmful to the story everyone else wanted to read. It's also entirely possible that after To Kill A Mockingbird she decided that nobody wanted to know her, they wanted to know the contrived backstory that she made up to justify the second draft of Watchman that she never started. You don't go with a title like Go Set a Watchman if you know what you're doing. You do that before you figure it out. My first titles are almost always awful.
What I don't understand -- and I haven't read this new book, would hate to -- is the flip in Atticus' ideology that everyone's talking about. There's something in the article about how she wrote a flashback (TKaM) that was better than the main thing she was trying to publish at the time (GSaW). Okay, not uncommon. But why, in the flashback, is Atticus a paragon of racial virtue and in the present tense shittier book, an asshole? The reason I'm so frustrated by this is that I can tell I might need to read the fucking thing to answer my question. Maybe part of the answer is TKaM being seen through the rose-tinted glasses of a 10 year old, and Lee really was/is trying to convey with this new book how our heroes as children don't turn out heroes. Disillusionment. But if so... badly done. (And I'm sure she realized that, before she had a damn stroke.) People who espouse the beliefs Atticus does, with the certainty and courage and so on -- they don't change. I am irrationally bothered by this. I don't even care for To Kill a Mockingbird particularly. The best thing about it is the title. -- Who was it that tried to burn a lot of his poetry on his death bed? One of the South Americans?
This book is a historical anomaly being published without revision given the questionable blessing of an old lady who isn't capable of editing it to bring it in line with its prequel. My guess is she realized Atticus as she originally wrote him wasn't working, he changed dramatically in the revision and this book should have been donated to a university archive and nothing else
A number of writers wanted at least their personal papers destroyed. Kafka, I believe, wanted everything destroyed, as did Virgil.