In the Wall Street Journal, Allan Barra takes the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird to assault the book’s exalted status.

The book is required reading in most American high schools, won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold perhaps 30 million copies, Barra reports. According to Publisher’s Weekly, it still sells 1,000,000 copies a year.

And yet…

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.”

I’m not sure that first sentence applies to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by the way, and yet we’d call that a great novel. Wouldn’t we?

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.”

Thus goes the Journal under Rupert, in which opposition to racism (artfully communicated or no) is described as “bloodless liberal humanism.”

Barra throws this in for good measure:

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.”

This argument is a bit confusing, because it’s usually liberals who huff and puff about moral ambiguity—in, say, protests against the death penalty or three-strikes laws.

But let us say for the sake of argument that this “a children’s book,” by which Barra and presumably O’Connor meant that it is morally simplistic. Does this mean that clear-cut morality only exists in childhood? Are there no situations in adult life where there is right and there is wrong?

Funnily enough, Entertainment Weekly reports that To Kill a Mockingbird is (and always is) one of the books cultural critics want to keep out of the hands of children.

Its foes: Apparently liberals who believe that the book incites racism. (Most of the other books on the list have to do with sexual identity issues.)

Meanwhile, the Guardian publishes its list of the 100 best books of all time. It has its oddities—really? Salman Rushdie?—but is nonetheless a pretty good summer reading list. For a lot of summers…