Posted 7/17/2010 02:48:00 PM by Douglas

Fifty years and 30 million copies later, To Kill a Mockingbird continues to be the scourge of the sophomore English Lit class all over this great land of ours. I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only that's not on board with its worship.

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in "To Kill a Mockingbird"; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon wrote in a 2006 story in The New Yorker, the book acts as "an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious."

It's time to stop pretending that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in "Jurassic Park."

Racism is bad, we get it. Maybe it wasn't that obvious in 1960 when first published, but I fail to understand the book's ability to resonate with readers in the age of affirmative action and a black president. But then there's the ridicule of America's favorite idiot, the Southern. Lee, knowingly or not, gave Hollywood and every 10th grade English Lit class reason to hate the South. See how dumb they are? Southerns are racist idiots. Got that?

Harper Lee's contemporary and fellow Southerner Flannery O'Connor (and a far worthier subject for high-school reading lists) once made a killing observation about "To Kill a Mockingbird": "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are reading a children's book."

That about sums is all up.