![]() ![]() ![]() It meanders quite a bit long passages describing the south drag. Her take on the book mostly boiled down to surprise and displeasure at its depiction of the elderly Atticus Finch as quite racist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan prone to inveighing against civil rights organizations.īut then, like most of the reviewers, Kakutani deployed a number of rhetorical questions that gave a sense she hadn’t quite been able to put the surrounding circumstances aside: “How did a lumpy tale about a young woman’s grief over her discovery of her father’s bigoted views evolve into a classic coming-of-age story about two children and their devoted widower father?” Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker pointed out that the two Atticuses were actually quite congruent, exhibiting a particular kind of Southern liberal racism: “And so beneath Atticus’s style of enlightenment is a kind of bigotry that could not recognize itself as such at the time.”Īnyway, Atticus aside, the verdict was nearly unanimous that this book was a bad read. Michiko Kakutani led the chorus of horrified reviewers in the New York Times. There seemed to be some idea that you could solve the mystery simply by interpreting the book, essentially a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. This investigative spirit – the conviction that something about all of this smelled bad – leaked into the reviews, which often had a sleuthing quality. ![]()
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