Customer Reviews

Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (B&N Classics)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Carol is a girl with big dreams. When she marries Kennicott, she moves from the Twin Cities where she has supported herself, to rural life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, where it is her dream to transform the sleepy town into something better.

The ups and downs of Carrie Kennicott's life were felt by each member of our Family Book Club. Just when it seems things can't get any worse for Carrie, they can -- but sometimes they get better.

This book has been subject to a lot of literary criticism. Surely, the story can be studied in many ways at many levels. However, one does not need to have a master's in English in order to get a lot of enjoyment out of Main Street.

Set in the 1920s, Carrie's story -- her feelings, the changes she tries to make to Gopher Prairie, and all of the people she meets there -- could easily be told today with only minor changes. And, although this book is overall rather depressing in nature, there were quite a few places that it had me laughing out loud.

Main Street really captures the aura of small town America, especially middle Minnesota. The real life Gopher Prairie is Sauk Centre, Minnesota. It's an interesting place to visit, as the main street there has now been renamed Sinclair Lewis Boulevard.

This was the book that gave us the phrase "Main Street" to denote middle, everyday America. The phrase we heard ad nauseam during the bank bail outs - Main Street vs Wall Street. The book captures the divide between rural and urban people, a battle we still fight today. The current usage of the term, with Main Street representing good, is an irony Lewis would proud of.

Carol, the main character, marries into a small town after having been independent and living in a large city, a big deal in a just-now post-Victorian period. She tries to introduce her new neighbors to new experiences - exotic foods, new styles, new ways of thinking - and completely fails at it. She doesn't hold her tongue either; "ash pile", a favorite term of hers, is about the modern equivalent of "s***hole". I've a feeling many the teen has been put off by her "modern" tastes - Chinese food and showing ankle seem pedestrian through a lens of 100 years. Today, she's be serving organic Latin-Asian fusion cuisine with a plunging neckline and going on about Pilates, and trying to start up neighborhood activist groups. And calling the town a s***hole.

One of thing things Carol rails against is the lack of high achievers in the town. As Sinclair puts it, most people capable (or desiring) real competition don't stay in town. The people who fear change or can't cope in a competitive environment stay put, enjoying the simplicities of small town life, with like minded people. And wind up drive Carol crazy with frustration.

Carol's story makes me thankful I live today - as a woman I have a choice in where I'm to live, and that divorce is a alternative for such a miss-matched couple. Her life-long entrapment is a fate most women today don't have to face. Still, she's willing to face who she is and not back down.

My main criticism of Sinclair Lewis is that he doesn't seem to take much pleasure in life. Everything rings hollow and false, with opportunities for genuine amusement and enjoyment lost. On the other hand, that world view does make for some biting sarcasm and commentary. I still giggle to myself when I remember the line (I'm quoting from memory) about the annoying teenage boy who caught the flu during the 1918 epidemic "but didn't have the sense to die of it".

When I started this book I wasn't sure if it would keep me, I was wrong. What is so interesting about this story is the scary revelation that in approximately 100 years societal mores have changed very little. This book is still relevant if only for that, but there is so much else. A complex story to which it is easy to relate.

Finally got around to reading Main Street, which I bought years ago, after enjoying Babbitt and Arrowsmith. I loved this book on two levels:

First, Lewis's portrayal of turn of the century day to day life is fascinating. This was a time when autos were taking over carriages, TV was not around yet, indoor plumbing was not a given. It really is amazing how much things have changed.

Which brings me to the second level: It was amusing to read a long-dead author's description of the treatment of anyone who dares to challenge the status quo. Carol and her friends are accused of being socialists and of being un-American because they want everyone to have the opportunity to succeed. Some things really haven't changed at all!

It was also interesting to read an account of the dawn of the women's movement. As far as I can tell, Lewis does a pretty good job of writing from an early 20th century woman's perspective. His main characters have depth, although, as I read somewhere else, too, his minor characters - not so much.

First read this in college (decades ago) and just recently re-read it. Still surprisingly relevant. Many of the conservative ideals of the Gopher Prairie residents that seeemed rather quaint back in the early 1970s are still around today and more popular than ever. Why are we still arguing about unions and worker's rights? This book is an indictment of not just small-town America, but small-minded Americans.

Aside from its polemics, the novel has great characters and one of the most vividly drawn settings in American literature. Arrowsmith, Babbitt, and Main Street all deserve to be read.

Sinclair Lewis burst onto the scene in 1920 with this searing novel about small-town USA. The story's main character is Carol Milford, an independent, progressive-minded young lady from the big city of St. Paul, Minnesota. Carol moves to small-town Gopher Prairie (Minnesota) when she marries Dr. Will Kenniccott, who is from the town. Carol is striving and somewhat rebellious, but her desires to liven up the place are stifled by the town's values of puritanism, conservativism and conformity. Within the town there is also ego, power, greed, and the prevailing view that those who are not good Main Street Republicans are suspect - if not bolshevik/anarchists. It helps readers to understand that this book arrived before radio, television or Walmart, when Main Street was truly the center of action in many small towns. In time, Carol comes to accept the stifling conservatism of Gopher Prarie (modeled after Lewis' home town of Sauk Center) even if she hardly embraces it.

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) soon followed Main Street with other socially critical novels including Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry. This book was published the year that Prohibition began and voters overwhelmingly chose Republican Warren Harding as President - Harding epitomizing staid, protestant conservatism (although privately he was a skirt chaser). Future journalist William L Shirer visited Sauk Center in 1921 and noted that many there felt insulted by this book. Quite understandable. Sinclair's portrayal of Main Street values is hardly flattering.

For Sinclair Lewis, his country is `a hope that is boundless. What is its future? A future of cities and factory smut? Homes universal and secure? Or placid châteaux ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find knowledge and laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? The ancient stale inequalities?'

The answer to these questions lies in the fate of the main character of this book, Carol Milford, a seed of liberty, `a rebellious girl eager to conquer the world - almost entirely for the world's own good.'
But her dreams are blocked by a wall of Puritanism, conservatism, conformism, hypocrisy and egoism, by the Tribal God of Mediocrity, by the arrogance of the power of `Main Street'.
Who occupies `Main Street'? The Churches, `the real heart of the community, the proper center for all educational and pleasurable activities'; also the bankers and the Grand Old Republican Party (`Everybody who doesn't love (it) is an anarchist').
Main Streeters are all those wanting to appear respectable, showing `poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge.'

Carol Milford `felt that she was being dragged naked down Main Street'. She was `surrounded by wolves, fangs and sneering eyes.' `They beat me with rods of dullness.'
Is her fight for `liberty' successful or will she be beaten ... keeping only the faith?

Read this exemplary US novel about the power of the Moral Majority and its `public opinions'.

Perhaps one who has lived a little will appreciate this novel.

Lewis magnificently captures the stark contrast of the urbanity of the cosmopolitan with the insular life of the forgotten small town. Our heroine arrives brimming with vigor as she eagerly sets about to enlighten their dull and monotone lives. Not so fast, not so easy.

As an aside, I have read many novels and the manner in which infidelity is treated is unique to my experience. Perhaps Main Street does has some lessons to impart in dignity and composure...

Carol Milford graduates from a small St. Paul college with idealistic notions of taking some backward prairie town and transforming it into a cultured utopia of the plains. When she marries small-town doctor Will Kennicott, she optimistically sees a chance to put her ideas into practice. After arriving in his hometown of Gopher Prairie, however, her ideas for reform fall on deaf ears, and she finds herself not the town's savior, but rather its prisoner.

Having grown up in a small town in Wisconsin, and lived in larger cities, I can see both the pros and cons of small-town life. Sinclair Lewis's portrait, however, is relentlessly one-sided and bleak. Gopher Prairie is so abysmal, and its denizens so unsympathetic, that it almost defies believability. Lewis doesn't treat his protagonist any kinder, either. We are privy to Carrie's every shallow thought, every flighty notion, every petty grievance, to the point where there's not much left in her to root for.

The title of this review is a quote from the book that encapsulates much of its plot. Chapters and chapters go by detailing Carol's dismal existence. I kept waiting and waiting for something--anything--to happen. Will she cheat on her husband? Will she run away? Will she kill herself? Finally around chapter 30 things start happening, but rather than satisfy me they just made me cringe. The book redeems itself a little in the last few chapters, adopting a more positive tone and injecting a dash of feminism, but it was a little too little and a little too late.

One thing's for certain, Lewis is an incredible wordsmith. His prose is elegant and effortless, with a beautiful poetic quality about it even when he's being sarcastic, ironic, or just plain depressing. With a simple turn of phrase he can describe a detailed scene or a complex human emotion that would take lesser authors whole pages to relate. I'm sure at the time it was written, this was a ground breaking novel, and years ahead of its time in its feminism and liberalism. I admired this book more than I enjoyed it. I am looking forward to reading more of Lewis's work, but I'll probably never read Main Street again.

She's an outsider, fresh from the big city, newly married to a country doctor in a small Midwestern town, and doing her best to cope with the stultifying life and smugness of her new acquaintances and friends who populate Gopher Prairie, Minn. It's the early 20th Century, and Carol is settling miserably into life here, joining the women's clubs, accompanying her husband on his medical rounds to the farms and country folks. Perhaps she can reform these people, beautify the town, bring some culture to the poor bumpkins. Otherwise, what's the point in trying to live here? This is Sinclair Lewis at his best, providing a scathing look at small town life.