In case you missed it, we’ve had a gin-yoo-wine publishing event last week: the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman on 14 July. (That date will become important as you read on.)

I’ll be frank: although her first book, To Kill a Mockingbird, won a Pulitzer Prize, was made into a much-beloved movie starring Gregory Peck, has sold more than thirty million copies in forty languages, and, according to the New York Times, is “one of the best-selling novels of all time,” I was never in the cult of Harper Lee. I don’t mean this as a slam against those—some of my dearest friends—who love the book. I just mean TKAM was one of many books I read in fifth or sixth grade, but I didn’t read it repeatedly or with any particular reverence.

Still, I know TKAM is much loved by many, and I fully appreciate why.

So when we all heard about this “discovered” manuscript back in early February—more than fifty years after the release of TKAM—I was in the Camp of the Highly Suspicious. My initial reaction was Uh-oh. Followed by I do hope it’s had good editorial oversight. I can’t help but think this might be a mistake. The whole thing makes me a bit nervous. I just couldn’t convince myself that anyone involved in this circus had Ms. Lee’s best interests at heart.

This opinion hasn’t changed. Google “Go Set a Watchman sales news” and you learn the book set a one-day sales record for Barnes & Noble, that it is setting sales records all over the world (more than 105K in the UK the first day), and on and on. People stood in line at midnight to buy the thing, y’all. Bookstores all over the country got more traffic last Tuesday than some of them get in half a year.

Tuesday the fourteenth of July was A Very Good Day for the book business.

And then the spoilers … er, reviews, began. The first chapter was released in the Wall Street Journal here in the States and in the Guardian in the UK—in both text and audio versions—on Friday the tenth. That alone was a spoiler.

I started getting messages from folks: Have you heard? Facebook and Twitter worked themselves into a tizzy. Folks were outraged—or heartbroken—as details came to light. No Watchman spoilers, please, posted one Facebook friend.

But kids, how do you think we get from manuscript to A Very Good Day? A lot of press. How do we get a lot of press for a book? It starts with advance release copies (ARCs) and the publisher’s PR folks working their networks. It’s the way the publishing industry has worked for decades. They send out advance copies to the NYT and other tastemakers. They want the book to be reviewed. They want to generate buzz.

In past years, average readers might not have seen a review in the Times unless they specifically sought it out. But these days … the Internet exists. And social media. Perhaps we also have a newer generation of reviewers who are less hesitant to spoil, but the purpose of a review has always been to intrigue, to titillate, to sell books.

One of my favorite reviewers, WaPo’s Ron Charles, addresses this in his article “Confessions of a serial book-spoiler” (warning: he opens with spoiler examples from several books, though none published after 2013):

Fortunately, I mostly review literary fiction, where the spoiler is that nothing much happens at all. But my colleagues who regularly review mysteries and thrillers must negotiate this problem all the time. How can a review set up a book’s conflict in all its fascinating complications without pointing too directly at the plot’s resolution?

Complaints about reviews that “give too much away” are, by far, the most frequent complaints I receive. Sometimes these objections seem justified, but often readers think a review is telling everything when, in fact, it’s only summarizing the first 30 pages. (Emphasis mine.)

Charles acknowledges that it can be difficult to review some books without giving away too much. But there can also be an element of eagerness to scoop. (And from here on, I’m going to refer to reviews of Go Set a Watchman, so if you have thus far managed to avoid the Watchman spoilers, you should bow out now.)

It was hard to avoid spoilers when so many commentaries came out with much fanfare even before the book released; not all spoiled but most did.

• New York Times / Friday 10 July
The headline prepares the reader for bad news, and it goes on from there: “Atticus is a racist.”

• Wall Street Journal / Friday 10 July
“Yes, that is correct: Atticus Finch, standard-bearer of justice and integrity and one of the few unambiguously heroic figures in American literature, was originally conceived as a segregationist.”

• Los Angeles Times / Saturday 11 July
“In Go Set a Watchman, [Atticus] has turned a treacherous corner, aligning with the citizen’s council and the Ku Klux Klan.”

• Washington Post / Sunday 12 July
“The adult Jean Louise encounters a different Atticus from what readers of ‘Mockingbird’ will remember. He joined the Ku Klux Klan …”

• The Guardian / Sunday 12 July
“Advance publicity has billed the second Lee as a chance to reunite with the ‘much loved’ characters of Scout and Atticus. This promise proves barely half true. … While one of the book’s two great shocks—the failure of a major figure to survive into the 1950s—is emotionally jolting, the other shatters the traditional reading of Atticus …”

• The Bookseller / Monday 13 July
Quotes earlier reviews and notes: “The key factor is the change in the depiction of Atticus Finch.”

• NPR / Monday 13 July
“Everybody who loves To Kill a Mockingbird is going to read it, no matter what I or any other reviewer says about its literary quality, the bizarre transformation of Atticus or its odd provenance. All I know for certain is that Go Set a Watchman is kind of a mess that will forever change the way we read a masterpiece.”

All those were before the release date on the fourteenth. By the release date, several other major review sites had followed suit with spoilers, while reviewers weighed in on what it all meant (although this list is by no means complete):

• The Bookseller / Tuesday 14 July
“It becomes fairly transparent, fairly early on, that this can only be taken as a first draft of what would become To Kill a Mockingbird.”

• NYT Sunday Book Review / Tuesday 14 July
“Would it have been better for this earlier novel to have remained unpublished? Though it does not represent Harper Lee’s best work, it does reveal more starkly the complexity of Atticus Finch, her most admired character.”

• Entertainment Weekly / Tuesday 14 July
Gives it a D+. “It reads, for the most part, like a sluggishly-paced first draft, replete with incongruities, bad dialogue, and underdeveloped characters, because it is a first draft—of Mockingbird.”

• EW / Tuesday 14 July
A roundup of reviews concludes the novel “disappoints.”

And that’s the thing. After I read the Times the weekend before publication, I felt like my original conclusions were correct: Go Set a Watchman is just not for me. I don’t think it got good editorial oversight. WaPo tells us “whole passages [were] repeated nearly word for word” and the Guardian says, “Unlike its predecessor, this text seems to have been printed much as submitted.” Most damning, the New Yorker:

The heavily hyped appearance of Harper Lee’s new or very old, or, anyway, indistinctly dated, novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (HarperCollins), reflects an ambitious publishing venture—complete with slow, striptease-style press leaks and first chapters and excited pre-publication surmise—in which all the other apparatus of literature, reviewers included, is expected to serve, and has. Not since Hemingway’s estate sent down seemingly completed novels from on high, long after the author’s death, has a publisher gone about so coolly exploiting a much loved name with a product of such mysterious provenance. (Emphasis mine.)

There you have it. Regardless of the provenance, it is intended to be an alternate imagining of the much-loved TKAM characters. Maile Meloy did this very beautifully and cleverly in her novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter. Ellen Gilchrist built a whole career of novels and short stories about the same small group of characters (some related, some not), with various stories told from various (sometimes conflicting) viewpoints over a period of decades.

But the LA Times had this: “Although Go Set a Watchman comes marketed as an autonomous novel, it is most interesting as a literary artifact.” Which is to say, Go Set a Watchman was Lee’s first draft of what would become—after much editorial input—To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, the Bookseller says, “It becomes fairly transparent, fairly early on, that this can only be taken as a first draft of what would become To Kill a Mockingbird. This perspective allows it to be an unprecedented insight onto a seminal novel, and renders complaints about it being inferior to To Kill a Mockingbird unhelpful if not irrelevant.”

Point taken. An astute reader might learn something about the writing process here. But would you want your first draft of anything looked at by anyone but your editor? Probably not. If this spoils it for you, my apologies.

* I know I’m showing my age.

Tweet: Tuesday the fourteenth of July was A Very Good Day for the book business.
Tweet: And then the spoilers … er, reviews, began. #GoSetAWatchman
Tweet: How do you think we get from manuscript to A Very Good Day for booksellers?
Tweet: The purpose of a review has always been to intrigue, to titillate, to sell books.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”