July 11 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that unlike most books is worth commenting upon when half-century anniversaries occur to it, something that Top Researchers speculate happens every five decades or so.
I very much like Mockingbird; the characters are wonderfully drawn, the pacing is sharp and careful (it's a better plotted book than it sometimes gets backhanded credit for), the dialogue is pitch-perfect, and there can be no doubt that Lee powerfully channels a very specific point of view from a very specific time and place. Mockingbird caught an American moment, and still catches it. And if that were easy to do, you could do it, and you can't.
Also, as is far less often observed, Mockingbird is one of the most remarkably edited of all modern American classics, whatever those are. Theresa Von Hohoff deserves a lot of credit for the novel's success. This is not at all a slight to Lee, but it may be a comment on the notion of the Exalted Solitary Literary Genius. (And that comment would be, "it is all my balls.")
And not to forget, Mockingbird's commercial fortunes are by any standard impressive, and it is genuinely astonishing that something like 2/3 of all US high school students have it inflicted on them. (Note: I'm not bothering to look up the specific studies right now, but this number is about right. As an aside, if I were in charge of what books high school students had to read by force of law, I would impose The Unnamable, because I don't much care for teenagers.)
Ahem, though, that's not the whole story....
One thing about Mockingbird that fascinates is how it is a "classic" that is not a "classic," by which I mean, speaking perhaps too generally just to make the point, the book is popularly considered Great Literature, but that's not necessarily the opinion of us Perfessers, who by and large have, well, ignored it. There are tons of Helpful Introductions for Students to the book & its author, of which mine, is, er, arguably the best (it's the best), but there is just not a whole heck of a lot in terms of analysis, historical contextualization -- you know, scholarship. (My book is the rocking exception.) (Shields' biography is solid, by the way, but it is telling for the point I'm making that it's more journalistic than academic, which is not a slight, just an observation.)
I don't think this reflects well on us Perfessers, as it happens. Mockingbird is a very important book, like it or not, one that has for better or worse (I think mostly better, though I have caveats, not that this matters much) been deeply influential in terms of how racism and the history of Southern American apartheid has been comprehended by generations, now, of Americans of all sorts who have taken high school English courses. (And it has also been very important for how Americans perceive lawyers, which is obviously a less serious issue than racism, but is at the same time and in the same moment simultaneously, not nothing of a nullity.)
A lot of the Perfessorial unwillingness to engage seriously with Mockingbird is to do with, clearly, its perception as Young Adult Fiction. That's snobbery. Lee is not Faulkner; I'm more than prepared to concede that Faulkner is much more advanced than Lee when it comes to literary innovation (I loves me some Faulkner), but, well, for the questions I'm getting at, that's just not relevant.
Over the next few weeks, interspersed with the usual ranting, I'll talk more about Mockingbird. But when I do, I'll be making it clear that this class of thing from Jesse Kornbluth is insupportable:
I never thought I'd see the day when "To Kill A Mockingbird" --- a novel that has inspired readers for half a century --- would be derided as a book about "the limitations of liberalism" (by Malcolm Gladwell, no less, in The New Yorker, of all places) and "a sugar-coated myth of Alabama's past" with a hero who's "a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams" (by Allen Barra, in the Wall Street Journal).
Flooobaroo, blagargh.
Christ, it's a book. Harper Lee didn't have the Answer to the Southern Racism Problem, and it's stupid and insulting to her to pretend that she did. Were we to expect the fiction produced by an inheritor of the white Alabama minor gentry of the 1930s to be free of bizarre ideas about race, we were to be, you know, morons.
And yes I know about this, and yes, Althouse will get hers.