Main Street (Signet Classics)

Got this for my mom and she loved it, so I can't complain.

A first impression of the books use of many three syllable words, some of which must be googled to understand, is that this is not a dime store type novel. The prose suggests an author who has been exposed to literary excellence, probably in a prestigious back east university. That would be an apt description of Sinclair Lewis who had grown up in Sauk Center Minnesota. The novel Main Street, takes place in Gopher Prairie Minnesota which is modeled after Sinclair’s Sauk Center birthplace. Sinclair obviously understood the eccentricities small towns of the upper Midwest in great detail and found it wanting after being exposed to the wider world.Sinclair’s descriptions of the town of Gopher Prairie in the protagonist Carols voice was, “In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank, not a dozen buildings which suggested that in the fifty years of Gopher Prairie’s existence, the citizens had realized that it was neither desirable or possible to make this, their common home, amusing or attractive.” Sinclair’s opinion of the inhabitants was similar, “Carol discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie. Even the young smart set, the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse.” Sinclair’s descriptions looked at the underside of the noble pioneers who wrested the land from its natural state to subject it to their will and to claim it as their own. From Sinclair’s description the result had been the planting of ugly little towns inhabited by intellectually impaired people. That Sinclair Lewis, a Midwestern small town reared boy was the first American to receive the Noble prize for literature belies Sinclair’s theses. However, believe that gifted small town youths migrate to large population centers is valid. The flotsam remains.It is interesting that the appearance of Midwestern small towns has, if anything, deteriorated during the approximately hundred years since Main Street was first published. The remaining buildings are a hundred years older and in need of maintenance, many buildings are gone and not replaced. Any new structures are usually built on the outskirts of the towns using prebuilt low cost construction methods that have a forlorn appearance on opening day.Sinclair Lewis’s described the pettiness of small town intrigues and jealousies. There is no upside to Midwest small towns in Main Street, yet Carol returns to Gopher Prairie, accepts it for what it is and knowing that she will not be able to change it except maybe around the edges.Having grown up in the Gopher Prairie type environment I found the story interesting for that reason. Beyond that, Sinclair is a skilled writer. His character and place descriptions are exceptional and he brings tension and anticipation to otherwise ordinary events.

Carol grows up in a rather intellectual home, but without a mother. She attends college and takes a job as a librarian in St. Paul. After a time, she meets Dr. Will Kennicott. They marry and go to Gopher Prairie to live. Carol is young and naive, and more than a little self-important. She goes about trying to reform the town and meets with limited success. Carol is smart, but not socially savvy. She has ideas, but is totally unfocused and easily distracted. She thinks she wants to be a reformer but has no idea how to go about it, and really she just wants recognition. She is dissatisfied with her life, imagines something more, and latches onto whatever shiny new thing or person she thinks will give her what she wants.I have very mixed feelings about this novel. It wasn't hard to read, most of the time. Occasionally, Lewis steps away from his story and lectures the reader for a bit. I found it hard to give those pages my full attention. Aside from that, the story is engaging and the characters are very believable. Main Street is meant to be a satire of small town America. In this it succeeds very well and doesn't feel dated.

In classic Sinclair Lewis fashion, the book looks at class, economics, everyman and the unlikely hero. Not much has changed in the 100 years since the book was first published - we remain challenged by our purpose, comfort versus change, independence versus codependence and expectations versus reality. A good read of Carol's coming of age and finding her purpose in a rural Minnesota town.

The book is well-written. It doesn't have the experimentalism of other Modernist works, or perhaps the grace of writing that, say, Melville exhibits, but it is tight, realist prose with insightful comments about humanity. I love how the characters are drawn, complicated as real life is, with the main character at first rebelling against the provincial town in which she finds herself, but then strangely making friends with some of them (out of perhaps familiarity) by the end of the novel. I think that is true to life and insightful, not to mention the plethora of other things which this book says about life in the Midwest and the time and place in which it is set. I found myself liking it much more than expected when starting out, with its realist nature being a particular draw.

Rereading this classic after many years has shown me how relevant this story still is though the narrow minded and fearful small town people live in all kinds of places now, but even after all these years Lewis" description of the kind of thinking that leads to extreme fear and conservatism is totally relevant. Worth reading if you have come up against small minded and bigoted people. Lewis description of their mental processes is very insightful. In addition it is just a good story and a well written classic novel. Be sure to get an unabridged edition. I noticed the ones on Kindle had different numbers of pages....from over 200 pages to over 400 pages. I got the longest version thinking it would be the most accurate to the original and though I have no basis for comparison, I believe it is the entire original version. Very interesting and entertaining classic with a strong intellect behind it. Lewis holds up well.

Interesting to re-read in 2021, but lacks the impact of when it was published.

Here is a short review. Published in 1920, at the time the novel was ground breaking in that Lewis’ story is told from the point of view of Carrie, the wife of a local doctor in the Minnesota town, Gopher Prairie. The book is an interesting read: neither human nature or Main Street have changed all that much since Lewis’ insightful novel was written.

I didn’t know where to start this review, so I decided to start at the beginning. The Puritan settlers are on the Mayflower sailing for the New World. What sort of main streets would they eventually have in their towns? Well, these people are famously seeking freedom, so it is unlikely they would be big fans of someone telling them how to build their towns. On the other hand, they are not seeking freedom in the sense of running through meadows with flowers in their hair. Puritans are religious fundamentalists. They are looking for the freedom to be just as fundamental as they want to be.So come forward a few hundred years and what do we find? We find a book about the odd, contradictory towns that evolved in America, trying to express freedom and fundamentalism at the same time. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, published in 1920, tells the story of Carol Milford, a clever and ambitious young woman, who at college harbours dreams of a career as a town planner. However, she marries a doctor, who persuades her to settle with him in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Gopher Prairie is about as far from town planning as you can imagine. This place has grown up piecemeal, as a centre for surrounding farms, where farmers can sell their produce, access a few basic services, and buy some essentials. The very fact that the town evolved in this unplanned manner, is supposedly an expression of the freedom of the American way. And yet there is also plenty of Puritanism about Gopher Prairie, curtain twitching, moralising and judgement. You can only be individual here in a narrowly accepted manner. If you are really out of the ordinary, a fey young man with artistic ambitions, or a young woman with new social ideas, the town’s idea of freedom will probably not extend to you. Ironically there is a sense of standardisation about this town which supposedly grew up in such a freewheeling rugged, individual, American manner. Carol discovers that ramshackle Gopher Prairie is virtually identical to many other towns in the American Midwest, as though they had all been laid out to some standard scheme.Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street is a long meditation on this peculiarly American combination of freedom and rigidity. It’s a big, sprawling book with no discernible plot, like a soap opera; but it’s lack of plot seems carefully planned. It’s not the most obviously exciting read, but it finds danger, excitement and drama hidden in the every day. There are a lot of scenes in kitchens, involving gossip, scandal, cooking, and the odd amputation of the injured limbs of farmers.There were times when I wondered why I was wading through this interminable description of small town life, but I kept on going and was glad I did. Main Street is a good way to understand America and Americans, especially today as the country struggles with leaders of government who display aspects of dictatorship and chaotic incompetence, in lethal combination.

Although it is the story of one woman's struggle for a life of meaning in the early 1900s, this is not so much a feminist novel as a humanist one, in the sense that Lewis explores the urge to the full realisation of human potential against the crippling effects of social conformism. Main Street is his shorthand for the small minded, hypocritically puritanical and extremely conservative spirit that he identifies with the small town of Gopher Prairie. He forensically examines the workings of this mind set, while detailing how the apparently petty citizens of GP are themselves victims, making the best of life as they find it within their narrow horizons. Here, it seems to me, are the social roots of the American Christian Right, the Tea Party, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Lewis's plea, through Carol Kennicot, for an expansive, hopeful, inclusive, and progressive engagement with the world, is still relevant.

Sinclair Lewis wished in Carol to depict a revolutionary in Carol, but her success was limited; it is never easy to achieve radical change. It seems to me that the strength of the novel is the incredibly accurate depiction of small-time life in the American Middle West in the first quarter of the twentieth century; hence the incredible popular success which followed. Lewis is not famed as a stylist, but his vivid descriptions of the prairies indicate that the criticism is not always tenable.

Don't start this book if you're feeling a little down. The weight of oppression it evokes is so real. In some ways the characters are very modern, in others very much not so. The social pressures in a small town are brought to life and every word builds the pressure. The heroine is an outstanding creation. She is so right and yet so wrong in her approach to her new life with her new husband in a new small town. The townsfolk and her husband are equally both right and wrong in their approaches to her. As a reader I constantly wanted them all to see what they were doing to one another. It was with a sense of relief that I finished it because I was so drawn into it all. Great writing.

I'm newly discovering a rich seam of American literature. Loved the book from the start; it feels like a novel written before its time, and yet timeless in its handling of subject matter. Character and place are beautifully constructed. Wonderful.