At a party recently, a woman told me that she was afraid to read Harper Lee’s new book because she—like Jennifer Love Hewitt and many other people—had named one of her children Atticus. I was not surprised to hear this. Americans treat Lee’s first book, To Kill a Mockingbird, as their secular bible and Atticus Finch as their secular Jesus (or at least high-school English departments do). But this woman had read the news reports. She’d heard that the character of Atticus Finch has been complicated by this new book, if you can call an unedited manuscript a book. Specifically, she’d heard the news reports that Atticus has been revealed to be a racist. I felt for her. I thought of those Germans in the 1930s who named their boys Adolf…
