Customer Reviews

Main Street (Dover Thrift Editions)

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Advice for first time readers of Sinclair Lewis: Start with Main Street. I started with Babbitt, a worthy novel, but inferior to Main Street. They share a nimble, though often heavy handed touch of irony, and good characterization; and Mr. Lewis' trenchant social commantary is present in both.

We all know the story: Carol Kennicott (nee Milford), educated at tiny Blodgett College, wants action: She wants to travel and live in a big city where she can see plays and hobnob with intellectuals. She meets future husband Dr. Will Kennicott at a St. Paul dinner party; (Throughout the novel, her feelings toward Will oscillate between admiration for his efficient practice and good nature, and discomfort with his depthless character). Will coaxes Carol onto a train bound for the hamlet of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. The bulk of the novel, which, considering the context, could be considered picaresque, consists of Carol's haphazard attempts to reform the obdurate, immobile mindsets of the citizens of her new home. Among the improvements Carol suggests are a library board composed of the well read men of the town, and a campaign to renew interest in reading (In a town where the great books are bypassed for the contemporary moralistic, optimistic, and religious authors), and a theater company containing one fine actor and a supporting cast of hams, who bungle through one play (the frivolous "Girl from Kankakee"; poor carol had Shaw or Sophocles in mind. Throughout the novel, Carol evinces a blinding fear of living as a stereotypic denizen of the American Main Street; her fears are intensified by the birth of her son another fetter that could prevent a night train escape from Gopher Prairie), and the loss of several friends (the most notable being Miles Bjornstam, a Swedish horse trader who leaves for Canada after his wife's death) Made desperate by the seeming ineffectuality of her reform efforts, and these fears of decline into a town matron, Carol runs off to Washington D.C. for a period, before returning half broken to Gopher Prairie, tractable while still picturing herself as a maverick.

A five star review does not preclude qualms over a piece of literature. Main Street is truly a marvelous book, but there are flaws. Irony peppered moderately in a story can lend life and humor; too much can overwhelm the reader with a sense that the author has no other crutch than easy, predictable amusement. Also, this being an episodic novel, there sometimes seems to be little tying the book together save for the overpowering contagion of yearning for excitement, reform, and freedom that leaves Carol and others in Gopher Prairie so disappointed. These should not be deterent enough to suggest you steer clear of Main Street, though. As with every marred but overall fantastic booke light breaks the dark for the reader willing to overlook flaws that, were he or she writing the novel, he or she couldn't have ironed out. As glorious a work of literature as it is an historical document, this is a delight for any serious or recreational reader.

Sinclair Lewis decided to paint a picture of the difference between small town life, and urban sophistication by telling the story of a young educated city woman who marries a doctor and moves to a small town. Lewis was really just going to make a simple story about class differences and the isolation between folks, and throwing in some of his own experiences from growing up in small town Minnesota. What he ended up with was a brilliant book that when first published in the early 20's struck a huge chord with the American public and became a huge seller and cultural phenomenon.

Carol Kennicott moves to fictional 'Gopher Prairie' in hopes of changing the town to a place of great city-sophistication that she can revel in. Her mind is set on changing the townsfolk and its inhabitants ways which she finds aloof and backward. Without giving away too much of the plot (which others I am sure here have already discussed), she runs into townsfolk who share her idea, and many who are suspicious of her motives.

What Lewis shows in great passage and scenery (you can literally touch and feel every blade of prairie grass he describes) is that even though Carol's ambitions seem great, (particularly when confronting all the clique like prejudices that pervade the small town), her methods come off as pretty high-falouting and preposterous based on a great deal of misunderstanding. Nobody in the novel has the right method on how people should live, but somehow everyone manages to live within their own personal bubble. You want to cheer Carol on (or wait hoping she will fall on her face if you feel that way), but you at least understand and realize the mindset that plagues people who want to come in to your life-home-family-town can be an almost impossible barrier.

The novel is unbelievably timeless. Reading this now I couldn't believe how the similar parallel issues that exist in this story are still relevant right now. Issues of Blue State vs. Red State, and how America right now is so divided speak volumes about how much this book is so on target even after several decades after its initial publication.

This book is without question a snapshot of America, there are many "Gopher Prairies" and "Carol Kennicots" (and all the other townspeople who you have met at some point) out there, and that is the absolute brilliance of this book. And of course the book has an American setting, but the conflicts that happen in this book could be happening anywhere in the world in any country. The small town vs. big city fight is universal.

This is the greatest American novel I have ever read thus far bar none.

My first Sinclair Lewis book: I'm impressed. The character of Carol is just outstanding. She's a heroine with whom you're irritated just as often as you're admiring of her. A 3-D woman, what a treat! I like how her "idealism" and "culture" are at times embraced and just as often rejected, because I think she functions as a mirror for the reader. How often do you and I try to "change" those around us? How often do they truly need it? How often are we blind to what needs to be changed about us, even as we set out to "improve" everyone? It's partly a satire of the two characteristics of our pioneering American life: we have to conquer and remake everything over in our own image, and yet we resist those efforts coming from anyone or anywhere else. What group of people doesn't? It's less the small-town mentality as the mentality of people who have banded together and enjoy their life because of its homogeneity and safety. It's not only socioeconomic issues that keep minorities, the middle class, and the well-to-do in their own neighborhoods, it's the common bond between you and your neighbors: in you, I see myself. This book is just a great effort to make us see ourselves; whether or not we change seems to concern Lewis less than whether or not we're aware of our idiosyncrasies.

Lewis was an enormously successful writer in the 1920s (really on the same level as Hemmingway and Fitzgerald), but he has faded and is hardly read today. This, however, has no bearing on the importance of his writing. His writings reveal the social realities and concerns of his time. He focuses on individuals not communities (not bound together in any organic way). He is also skeptical about success and the American dream. There is a real sense of contempt toward the middle-class in Lewis. He really fills in a gap in The Great Gatsby, which included old money, new money, and the working class, but where is the middle class. As a result, Lewis' is famous for satirizing the middle class.
Lewis wrote Main Street in 1920. In short it examines the big cities reaction against the small town. He idealizes rural America as the strength of America in the 19th century. And, in the 1920s more Americans are living in metropolitan areas than in small towns for the first time in this country's history. Lewis reverses the romantic view of the rural, bucolic America and portrays it as ignorant. He caught a key strand in American life. Many thousands of Americans were once rural dwellers who moved to the big cities, and they or their neighbors were reading Main Street.

Some of the most enduring works of literature live on in our collective memory not because of their plot, or their characters, or their message, but because of their setting. Main Street is such a book. Mention Gopher Prairie, MN to anyone who has read this book, and images of quintessential small-town America will quickly come to mind. This book isn't so much about Carol or Will Kennicott, or any of the other characters who populate this narrow-minded, Puritan, one-horse town. It's about the town itself, and what it represents for broader America in the early 20th century. It's not the greatest book, but I would recommend it because of its ability to capture a sentiment that defined a significant period in our nation's history.

Small towns have certainly changed over the past eighty years - some today are fairly progressive - but some things will never change, like the fact that everyone knows everyone else's business in a town of a few thousand or less. If you cheat on your husband, don't bother trying to keep it a secret in Gopher Prairie. Or if you pay your maid a dollar more per week than your neighbors. And don't even think about trying to change the way things have always been done around here. If it was good enough fifty years ago, it's still good enough today.

Gopher Prairie is a town with a skeptical fascination of the big city, a fascination that it does its best to hide. It's a town that is perfectly happy basking in its own ignorance and hiding behind a veil of conservative values.

It's also a town of wide open spaces, with beautiful lakes and fresh air and no crime. And it's a place where neighbors will always help neighbors, as long as they can poke through their dirty laundry at the same time.

Main Street is a tad longer than it needs to be, and a bit tedious at times. But it's on the Modern Library Top 100 list for good reason.

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis is a classic novel about a woman who feels trapped in her small town life. Coming from a little village on the prairie much like the one described by Lewis, I very much identified with this book and found it to be a great read.

Carol is a young librarian fresh out of college in St. Paul, Minnesota, when she meets Dr. Will Kennicott. Kenicott courts her, and since Carol is bored with her life in St. Paul and has idealistic visions of reforming his hometown, she agrees to marry him. Upon arriving in Kenicott's hometownof Gopher Prairie for the first time, the new Mrs. Dr. Kenicott is horrified. She finds the town to be ugly and crude, and its inhabitants to be common and dull.
Carol sets out on several campaigns to revive the town: change its architecture, liven up their parties, start a dramatic club, among other things, but all are met with deliberate uncooperation on the part of the town.
The novel is a collection of events that serve to illustrate how different Carol is from Gopher Prairie. As the novel progresses, Gopher Prairie is painted as a self-satisfied and righteous dingy little town that shuns anyone who sees room for improvement in Gopher Prairie. Its inhabitants are primarily concerned with talking about crops and other people, and the more scandal, the better.
Carol leaves Gopher Prairie several times in an effort to escape Gopher Prairies expectations that she be a content housewife, even spending two years in Washinton, but she ultimately returns, accepting Gopher Prairie, but still determined to change it in small ways. The book ends on the somewhat melancholy note of Carol discussing her new outlook on reforming Gopher Prairie, while her native husband only half listens and thinks of the weather.

Coming from a small town myself, I foung Sinclair Lewis' portrayal of a small town to be right on. The town pride, the malicious gossips, the crop talk-- all are the perfect picture of true small town life. Lewis' satire is however, double edged, as Carol Kenicott is often portrayed as a judgemental city dweller who has no real understanding of the importance of non-city life. Carol is often sickeningly idealistic, sometimes to the point that she is just as irritating as the gossiping matriarchs of Gopher Prairie.
In places, the novel does get bogged down under the weight of just a little too much narrative, a few too many extra stories. As a whole, the novel was an enjoyable picture of one woman's struggle against the norm, done in wonderful descriptive style.

I grew up in a small town in Iowa, and this book captures so well the experience of small towns, whether they be in Iowa or Angola. The frustrations and triumphs of Carol are universal and unending, and perhaps even more timely today than they were when this book was first published. "Main Street" is not so much about a woman in a repressive patriarchal society as it is about any independent spirit trapped by circumstance in a well-meaning but banal social structure composed of individuals too bound by convention to breathe free. This is a gently told cautionary tale that should be on every reading list in every high school in the nation.

I feel like every book I read is time I literally have to steal from the rest of my life. I feel resistance to my reading habits- from my job, my wife, etc. It's like I have to fight for every moment for every single book that I want to read. I guess that makes it more rewarding, but it also means that my reading habits have acquired a patina of guilt- like I'm a drug addict. That's how I feel about it - that I have to keep it secret, that I have no one to share it with, that I am isolated and alone when it comes to my reading habit. It's a small part of my life, but a distinct one.

Main Street was an epic commerical success when it was released in the 20s. It's an odd choice for a commerical blockbuster, but Lewis must have captured the zeitgeist- I see it kind of like an American take on existenalism. Primitive, rudimentary, but accurate and complex in its own way. Main Street tells the story of Carol Kenicott, who marries a small town Doctor from Minnesota in the first fifty pages and then spends the rest of the book bitching and moaning about the vagaries of small town life- with it's close mindedness and preachy intolerance.

After this book "Main Street" entered the American lexicon as a short hand for a collection of attitudes that embodied small town america- and a negative anallysis of those attitudes, but Lewis's book is more sympathetic to small town america then one might expect.

The true hero of this book is Doctor Kennicott- who puts up with wife Carol's complaints with barely a whimper. As for the attitudes of main street- I think all of America, with maybe a few big city exceptions, resembles Main Street- Lewis notes that many of the people in his fictional Minnesota town left for southern california, so in that way I think this is a useful book to read for "blue staters" when they are trying to understand what makes the "red state" world tick.

"Main Street": The title alone invokes placid images of the most tranquil pockets of middle America. And Sinclair Lewis could hardly have picked a name more suggestive of rustic simplicity and provinciality than Gopher Prairie for the Minnesota town that is the setting of his novel. Gopher Prairie is supposed to be a prototype of thousands of American small towns in the early decades of the twentieth century, paradise for those who like to cling comfortably to convention, unbearable for those who seek cultural refinement and artistic freedom.

Lewis's protagonist is a bright, pretty, and progressive college-educated girl named Carol Milford who has great dreams of widespread social reform: educating children, aiding the poor, rebuilding and beautifying small towns. Working as a librarian in St. Paul, she meets and falls in love with a visiting country physician named Will Kennicott, who convinces her to marry him and return with him to his native Gopher Prairie, fresh clay to be molded to her heart's delight.

Gopher Prairie turns out to be not much advanced from its days as a frontier settlement. Populated primarily by farmers of Scandinavian descent and a gossipy, judgmental group of white collar townspeople, it is staunchly set in its conservative ways and not very receptive to ideas of change. The town's cultural outlook is dictated by the whitebread tastes of the more outspoken and influential religious leaders, and Carol's efforts to instill a sense of higher culture and broaden people's horizons by starting a theatrical club and getting better books for the library are viewed with suspicion and ridicule. Even Carol's own husband tends to have a nonchalant, dismissive attitude towards her plans. The town's sole rebel is the handyman Miles Bjornstam, a self-described lone wolf and pariah, who likes to taunt the stuffed shirts in town with his defiant disregard for their money, his independence, and his atheistic and socialistic ideas.

Rather than let Carol conquer the town through perseverance, Lewis opts for realism by restraining his heroine's success. After having a baby, she naturally becomes more domesticated and reluctantly gives herself up to the way of life in Gopher Prairie. She has chances to rebel with potential extramarital affairs and a separation from her husband to move to (the less friendly and intimate) Washington, D.C., and get a job, but ultimately she returns to Gopher Prairie, realizing that life is about compromises, and changes and reforms take more time and organization than she has to offer. While her dreams may not be completely fulfilled in her lifetime, there is hope in the future generations.

"Main Street" is ambitious and bold but perhaps does not have quite the impact that Lewis intended. He makes his point relatively early in the novel and spends the remainder of it spinning out variations on his theme of Carol vs. Gopher Prairie, relying on scenes connected episodically rather than on an arching plotline. What Lewis lacks in narrative acumen, he more than makes up for in drawing distinctive characters and scripting sharp dialogue with a good ear for dialect. When he coalesces this skill with a focused story and a strong social statement, as he does in his later, better novel "Elmer Gantry," he proves himself to be a worthy rabble-rouser in American literature.

Yes it is! As I sit here thinking about the experience of reading the book, and it is an experience I assure you, I can tell you that there are slow periods in this "story" when you hope it will be "over soon". So, don't expect an "easy read" on this one. But the main idea is so "universal" and the story in its totality is so well written, that you forgive any "lapses into boredom" of the narrative. In fact, that's partially what the book is about: "small town boredom" of an intelligent and thoughtful and self examining lady in the early part of the 20th century. And, further, it's about the "will to overcome" and the "courage to overcome" this boredom and pettiness of the small town by the main character who is a "downtrodden female" of that era. I think this could be considered a "woman's lib" book. As you read you will "cheer on" the main character, Carol, as she faces down the town pettitness and town bullies and even her somewhat staid but basically "good guy" husband.

The main thing that is bugging Carol is this: She "hasn't found her true life's occupation" and she feels "trapped" in the little podunk town of Gopher Prairie and in her marriage so that she'll never "find her true self". (wow, what a name for a town!o) This theme is a universal theme because everyone, even men, have the same driving force of finding "who am I" and "where do I really belong." It's a "universal theme". Thus this is an "important book" to read if you have ever had similer thoughts and restiveness about "where do I belong" and "what is my true purpose in life." Just keep reading past the "slow parts" and you'll find that your effort will be rewarded. Email boland7214@aol.co