If we regard this book as literature, it is an unqualified failure. But these juvenile stories and essays shed fascinating light on the repression of Lee’s early life
W
hen a new book is published by a writer dead for a decade, there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. When the writer is Harper Lee, there is also the unpleasant aftertaste of the release of her second novel, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman, which was promoted as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, when in fact it was a formless early draft. The publication was also surrounded by controversy over whether the aged Lee, by then seriously disabled, had really consented to its publication.
This new book, The Land of Sweet Forever, is a much more conventional enterprise: a collection of Lee’s unpublished short stories and previously uncollected essays. No deception is being practised here, and if people want to read the lesser scribblings of a favourite author, it is surely a victimless crime. However, like most such books, it has little to offer to those who aren’t diehard fans.
The short stories, written in Lee’s youth, are all badly underdeveloped. Most fail to work even as vignettes. One centres on trying to find a place to unload a truck in Manhattan; another on a temporary change to the way the doxology is sung in a Methodist church. A slender piece about the quirks of New York movie audiences is categorised as a story, but feels more like a newspaper sketch. The young Lee seems to have little sense of what a story is.
