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The Job

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Sinclair's first critically successful work has similar soundings to Main Street and Ann Vickers. The novel describes the adventures of Una Golden as she learns to survive the daily grind of working for a living in dead end jobs.

Lewis vividly describes the dullness and hopelessness surrounding typical "women's work" in the early 1900's. Lewis also shows that marrying can also be a dead end in itself, especially when one marries to simply escape working.

I liked this book quite a bit. However, it lacked the bite and suspense of Ann Vickers or even Main Street. This book should be read by Lewis fans or those with an interest in the early 20th century workplace.

S.L.'s style is fluid, and the story engaging. Una's plight was and is familiar, and her heroic efforts to keeping moving forward and improving her lot is equally familiar and laudable. The only glaring fault is the unfortunate ending, and perhaps is Lewis coming through as a man rather than Una as woman.

In ten years, 1905 - 1915, Miss Una Goldman, heroine of Sinclair Lewis's 1917 novel THE JOB, moves from 24 year old economic nobody in backwater Panama, Pennsylvania to success in business at age 34 in cutthroat New York City. She is not pretty, not well educated. How then does she rise in a man's world?

First, she is friendly and makes enough affable acquaintances and a few friends (increasingly they are women) that she creates a booster or referral network which she can call on and does call on. Networking, beginning with contacts in a New York City commercial school, from time to time help her find a better job: first just stenographic, then secretarial and lightly supervisory and finally with real responsibility for selling real estate. On her own she markets herself to her final employer who takes her into his recently formed and expanding chain of hotels as a manager of several departments.

Along the way Una Golden forms a crush on a man who leaves New York for a better job in Omaha. She later marries unsuitably an alcoholic womanizer much older than she. Him she dumps eventually as he becomes more and more a lazy sponger. In the end she is reunited, most implausibly, at age 34 with her first love and the implication is that they will marry, have children and both continue to work -- something her old fashioned husband forbade Una to do once he was back on his feet economically.

Unlike ELMER GANTRY or THE GOD SEEKER, Sinclair Lewis's THE JOB is relentlessly, single-mindedly, depressingly secular and this worldly. Here are some of the very few references of any kind to organized religion.

Of Una's father just before he dies at novel's beginning: "He believed that all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican party." ( Ch. I).

On their first dinner date, Una's first boyfriend (who returns in triumph at novel's end) asks "Which god do you favor at present -- Unitarian or Catholic or Christian Science or Seventh-Day Advent?" Una thought that they all worshipped the same God. He says that the same God can't both approve candles and music in an Episcopal Church and reveal to the Plymouth Brotherhood the wickedness of organs and candles." Una agrees that she really does not care which church is right. He goes on to say that church buildings are touted as God's houses but are allowed by congregants to be ugly. But he admits that his real thoughts about almost anything are critical and negative. End of discussion. (Ch V)

Another suitor spoke with Una after "(s)he had been to church; had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity. She felt righteous and showed it." (Ch. IX)

Una moved into a rather posh and nominally strict boarding house for working women that as a matter of policy admitted "East Side Jews" but "no agnostics or Catholics." Yet Una's roommate, a Roman Catholic, had got away with telling the landlady that she was a "Romanist Episcopalian." Una's encounters with Jewish men and women in various levels of New York business were invariably friendly and productive. Decisively helpful later in Una's business rise was her lame Jewish boarding housemate Miss Mamie Magen, who was brilliant and increasingly well connected in charitable circles. (Ch. XI) Mamie was scornful of "half-churches, half-governments, half-educations." Mamie explained New York to Una, brought the metropolis to life. Thanks to Mamie Magen, Una found a two week temporary job with the jobbing firm of Herzfeld and Cohn, two white-bearded Orthodox Jews. Una had had nebulous prejudices of the Jews then beginning to conquer New York business. Yet the two partners had merry eyes, gestures of sympathy and created a pleasant, companionable office environment. They were not tyrants but patriarchs, elder workers. They made their office "a joyous adventure." Una looked forward each day to her work and learned lessons she would later apply elsewhere about how to humanize the work place. (Ch. XIV) In her next to last office, the dynamic Jewish partner in a real estate office proposed marriage, but Una merely admired him, did not love him. (Ch. XVI)

With her Catholic roommate Una "attended High Mass at the Spanish church on Washington Heights ... ; felt the beauty of the ceremony; admired the simple, classic church; adored the padre; and for about one day planned to scorn Panama Methodism and become a Catholic, after which day she forgot about Methodism and Catholicism." (Ch. XII) In the first two years of her marriage, Una's salesman husband was out of town 2/3 of the time and she herself did not work. To keep her shorthand alive, she took down "the miscellaneous sermons -- by Baptists, Catholics, Reformed rabbis, Christian scientists, theosophists, High Church Episcopalians, Hindu yogis, or anyone else handy -- with which she filled up her dull Sundays. ... Except as practice in stenography she found their conflicting religions of little value to lighten her life. The ministers seemed so much vaguer than the hard-driving business men with whom she had worked; and the question of what Joshua had done seemed to have little relation to what Julius Schwirtz (her husband) was likely to do. The city had come between her and the Panama belief that somehow, mysteriously, one acquired virtue by enduring dull sermons." (Ch. XVI)

In THE JOB Sinclair Lewis shows little belief in religion as able to uplift and change lives of his characters. And those lives emphatically need uplifting from the relentlessly dull, stressful, slave-like conditions most women face in their low-paying office jobs. Sinclair Lewis's women generally see only two ways out of having to work: to marry or to die in harness. A few women such as Una Golden and Mamie Magen break out of their pre-ordained ruts and create a third possibility: doing better work than their men colleagues and convincing progressive bosses to give them a chance to prove themselves.

-OOO-

I found this to be somewhat inferior to his other early novels (i.e., before Main Street). He is more slick in that professional writer's way here; I like him better when he was willing to take some stylistic risks; but nothing like that happens here. Main Street may not be a masterpiece, but it is certainly more interesting and unusual than this one.