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Still suspicious that it’s a hoax. No overt anachronisms (unless Uncle Jack’s use of “white supremacist” was one). That it is so closely tied to TKAM in theme and even who the characters are, that there are so few additional characters–it’s the kind of work a person tasked with creating an explanation for why Harper Lee returned to live in Monroeville would write.

Part of the opening 100 pages could have been written by Alice Munro because it seems so much like Munro’s world of tiny observations on the trials of being a woman in the 1950’s.  Lacks Munro’s facility with language, of course, and those startling leaps that create moments of discovery. When I read this I thought what pleasure Harper Lee must have derived from Munro.

Ending. Pop psychology tells me it’s about a something called an accommodation. While unsatifactory on many levels, it does satisfy on one level: the book does seem to be about big and little themes, personal and public (political and social) issues simultaneously, and about the kind of consciousness that encompasses that.  In this, it is Huck Finn again. It underscores the serious public intentions of TKAM,

Visiting Uncle Jack to have it all explained to you reminded me of Winston having things told him by Obrien in 1984, or Montag hearing from Faber and Beatty all the unpleasant truths of the world in Fahrenheit 451.

Jean Louise’s outsider status is important throughout, and is it the writer’s stance, her lot in life (i can’t beat him, I can’t join him) and is it a layer covering another kind of outsiderism: lesbianism? A question I can’t either shake or answer, and usually wonder if it even matters.

Will be the source of countless theses–i feel sorry for English profs. It is a fascinating document when considered as part of a writer process when put beside TKAM.  It does not resolve the issue of Capote’s contributions to TKAM though.  That is, it’s not the case that this is so strong and clearly in the same voice with the same strengths as TKAM that one can say they were the result of the same hand.

There appear to be minor errors that you’d expect an editor to have corrected. ?

Some experimentation with voice–the streams of dialogue rendered in the Coffee episode for example. Nice to see.

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