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Cass Timberlane

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Near the end of this novel Sinclair Lewis writes, "If the world ever learns that it knows nothing yet about what keeps men and women loving each other, then will it have a chance for some brief happiness before the eternal frozen night set in?" In relating the married life of Judge Cass Timberlane and his wife Jinny, Lewis ponders the question and offers nothing more than "patience" as a possible answer.

Cass Timberlane, 41 and divorced, falls for Jinny Marshland, a girl from the other side of the tracks who is half his age. Everyone, just about, tries to dissuade him from what they see as a romantic fling with little chance of permanence resulting, but Timberlane is determined to marry her. And he does. And she flies the coop. She falls in love with Bradd Criley and runs off to NYC with him. But she becomes deathly ill there, and Timberlane "rescues" her and she realizes she loves her husband after all. Interspersed throughout the novel are a number of "assemblages," very short snapshots of various good and bad marriages (mostly bad), Lewis's commentary on the marriage situation in middle-class America. He has the chauvinistic view that most bad marriages are the fault of the woman. At the end of one early assemblage, though, he espouses a pretty clear view about successful marriages: "My experience" [Dr. Drover says] "is that it's all nonsense to say that marriage is difficult just because of complicated modern life on top of the fundamental clashes of the sexes. It's all perfectly easy if the husband just understands women and knows how to be patient with their crazy foibles. You bet!" It's exactly what Timberlane is able to do with Jinny and thus keep their marriage together. Lewis's writing is breezy and natural, especially the dialogue. Other than for the rather old-fashioned and melodramatic ending, the book is pretty good.

This book is masterfully written and reveals a tremendous insight into the nature of human beings by its author, Sinclair Lewis. Cass Timberlane, a middle-aged, divorced judge in a moderate-sized city in Minnesota, is smitten by a pretty twenty-something girl who passes through his court room one fine day. While Jinny has good looks, youth and, a personality all her own, the Judge readily grafts his own ideal of his perfect mate onto this attractive not-so-blank slate. He never wavers in his perfect vision of this imperfect person and the seeds of discontent and relationship failure are sown from the moment they met. Jinny, for her part, tries to tell the Judge who she really is but he will not see it. Unfortunately, she is both seduced by the opportunity he represents for her and lacks the strong sense of self (and, selfishly, desire) necessary to shake him from his illusion. This culminates in a disasterous and doomed marriage. The author plays this out in a brilliant, witty and realistic manner that makes for a fascinating read. Interspersed throughout the novel are vignettes of couples and people whom we meet along the way. It is often said that the only people who truly know what happens in a relationship are the two who are in it. To read these shorts is to extend that knowledge to a silent, invisible, third party observer. Many of them are unpleasant and not all of them work but they offer a peek behind the veneer of contentment and normalcy that couples present to the rest of the world. As Cass and Jinny spiral out of control and the arguments come faster and faster without logic or reason, the author offers up the explanation that "But of them all, there was only one cause; they did not know what they wanted." While it would appear that most who have reviewed this book think their relationship ends in a triumph of love, I beg to differ. At the end, Cass still sees Jinny as unrealistically as he always has and Jinny has been beaten down to the point of being "...mildly sad about it, just enough to assert her non-existent independence...". She cannot make love to him because the love of another man still holds her heart. When she comes into his bedroom because she is too cold from the Minnesota night, he sees it as an act of reconcilation and, finally, requited love. However, she swears she'll fix her storm windows so she can go back to her bedroom and so the cycle will go on and on with two people who are hopelessly caught by each other.