Only Scout is Scout

There’s this ‘famous’ librarian named Nancy Pearl who is a frequent contributor to NPR. She’s always offering up one book list or another, and they’re usually pretty good. The other day she recommended the book The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. It’s probably a good book, Tartt’s books are usually well received. But the main character in The Little Friend is a young girl named Harriet whom Nancy Pearl compared to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and to Frankie in The Member of the Wedding.

I don’t like facile comparisons with the most memorable characters in literature. Every woman in a Civil War novel is not Scarlett O’Hara, even if the setting is the same. Every tight-fisted businessman is not Ebenezer Scrooge, even if he does experience a soul-saving epiphany by the story’s end. And every clever, spunky little girl is not Scout, or Frankie.

It makes it easy to get someone interested in a book we like if we can say it’s like another book everyone knows, or the characters are like characters they know. But we need to be careful. Nobody, really, is like Scarlett O’Hara, or Ebenezer Scrooge, or Scout or Frankie. That’s why these are such memorable characters, and why the books they animate are among the best ever written. If you start reading a book with the idea that you are about to experience something as powerful as To Kill a Mockingbird, or Gone with the Wind, and it turns out to be just another well-written book – enjoyable, but clearly not a classic – it will only disappoint.

I believe Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend is probably a good book, like most of her books. There are suddenly requests on it again, even though it’s almost four years old. Maybe people will find that Harriett reminds them of . . . someone else they know. I hope they like it.

Have you ever been referred to a book because it was like something else, but it turned out to be nothing like the supposed precursor? Or at best a derivative imitation?