A Reaction Sauce
Yesterday we linked to Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent New Yorker essay, “The Courthouse Ring,” in which Gladwell discusses Atticus Finch, Alabama Governer “Big Jim” Folsom, race, and “the limits of Southern liberalism.”
Well over at The Millions Garth Risk Hallberg has published a reaction, “Fillet of Mockingbird in a Gladwell Reduction Sauce.” Hallberg wishes to defend Finch, and writes of Gladwell: “Following George Orwell, he seems to want novels to provoke ‘a change of structure’ rather than ‘a change in spirit.’ That is, he wants them not to be novels.”
Read both Gladwell’s essay and Hallberg’s reaction, and then let us know your take on the matter in the comments below. (via Rumpus reader lemuel)
August 12th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
I don’t think Hallberg “wishes to defend Finch,” as you wrote in the intro above — at least this doesn’t appear to be his primary motive for writing the piece.
Hallberg’s most relevant points about Gladwell’s piece:
“A more nuanced article might have made the argument that To Kill a Mockingbird has a didactic streak, and that it puts Atticus Finch forward as an allegorical figure of enlightenment. Or that readers of the book have mistakenly read him allegorically, rather than as a human being with human limitations. Or that To Kill a Mockingbird is not a very good book, and is racist to boot.”