Quiet launch for Harper Lee’s ‘Watchman’ at Modesto bookstore

Shelby Benz hopped out of her dad’s car and bounded over to the doors of the Barnes & Noble bookstore, to join a line that wasn’t there.

With about eight minutes to go before the bookstore’s two-hour-early opening at 7 a.m., there was no crowd for the much-anticipated release of “Go Set a Watchman,” the sort-of sequel to Harper Lee’s beloved 1960 novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“This is pathetic, Shelby. Modesto is the literary vacuum of the world,” her dad, Robert, called from several yards away, throwing his arms up in the air in exaggerated umbrage.

“She actually got up early for this – got me up early, too,” he added, to the only other person in the parking lot.

“But Dad, you get a tote bag,” the beaming teen responded teasingly.

Atticus Finch clearly is no Harry Potter when it comes to summoning swarms to book launches.

Still, the 14-year-old soon-to-be freshman in the Modesto High School International Baccalaureate program seemed unfazed by the absence of other readers waiting at the doors to snap up copies of “Watchman.” And she was largely untroubled by what she’s heard about the novel’s depiction of Finch, the crusading, heroic lawyer of “Mockingbird.”

“I’ve heard that Atticus’ demeanor changes a bit, so I’m a little nervous to hear about the changes in his character,” Shelby said. “I’m excited, though, to find out.”

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Mockingbird,” Finch is a righteous Alabama attorney and model parent to son Jem and daughter Scout who risks his physical safety to defend a black man accused of rape. Privately, he wonders why “reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up.”

In “Watchman,” set 20 years later, in the mid-1950s, Finch is portrayed as an aging racist who laments the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which declared segregation in schools is “inherently unequal.”

“Can you blame the South for resenting being told what to do about its own people by people who have no idea of its daily problems?” Finch says.

He also asks his now-grown daughter, who goes by her given name, Jean Louise, “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

Modesto’s Barnes & Noble manager said she couldn’t provide numbers, but there were “many” pre-orders for “Go Set a Watchman,” and at least three displays in the McHenry Avenue store held a combined hundreds of copies. “Within hours of announcing it on barnesandnoble.com, it was a best-seller,” manager Susan Honn said.

Since the revelations about Atticus Finch, employees haven’t heard much in the way of disappointment from readers. The general thought, they said, is that generations of people who read the book in school and love the characters want to see how the story plays out.

That’s how Shelby Benz – wearing a black T-shirt that read “Law Offices of Atticus Finch, Attorney at Law, Maycomb, Alabama” – is looking at it. She just read “Mockingbird” in school, poring over each chapter about three times. She’s still writing notes on it, at 80 pages and counting. “It will be hard to see (Atticus) is not as perfect as everyone expected. I’m anxious to see how Scout, or Jean Louise, handles it,” she said.

Falina Van Lewen, who arrived at Barnes & Noble to pick up her pre-order shortly after 7, has her fingers crossed that Lee’s novel will redeem the flawed character of Atticus. The revelation of what’s become of him is “a loss of innocence,” she said. “And knowing that there’s not going to be a fix to it ... there’s not going to be another novel, I keep hoping there will be a twist” that will set things right.

“After reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ I was disappointed that Harper Lee had published only one book. So when I found she’d published another, I was ecstatic. I Googled the book and it said she shows his racism. That was disappointing to me.” Referring to the question Atticus posed to Jean Louise about having blacks “in our world,” Van Lewen said, “I can’t imagine those words came out of his mouth.”

She said she tried to avoid spoilers that revealed plot points, but “curiosity killed the cat,” and when she learned of Atticus’ dark side, she briefly considered not reading “Watchman” and letting the character remain as she knew him from “Mockingbird.”

But her appreciation for author Lee won out. “She’s such a good writer, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, ‘I wish she’d written a second book.’”

Also among the handful of readers picking up their pre-orders of “Go Set a Watchman” was Jacky Deabler, who’s remained intentionally ignorant of the talk surrounding the novel. She knew there was some controversy, but that’s it.

“It’s been on the news. ... But when they said Lester Holt (of ‘Dateline NBC’ and ‘NBC Nightly News’) was going to talk about it, I turned it off. It was in The Modesto Bee, so I closed the paper. It was on Rush Limbaugh, so I didn’t watch. I want to make up my own opinion.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2015 at 10:40 AM with the headline "Quiet launch for Harper Lee’s ‘Watchman’ at Modesto bookstore."