Customer Reviews

Main Street: Library Edition

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The story of Carol Milford, a free-spirited young woman from St. Paul, Minnesota. She marries Will Kennicott, a country doctor in the town of Gopher Prairie, who is several years older than she is. As she moves to Gopher Prairie she is shocked by how backward the town is and makes attempts to change it: she holds creative parties for their circle of friends, tries to renovate the city hall, starts a drama club. In all her efforts she is derided and criticized by the townsfolk. She only finds the kind of companionship she seeks in some of the town's misfits and lower-classes, but it is never satisfying for her.

Published in 1920, the story takes place in the 1910s and deals with a lot of the social issues prominent then. There are frequent mentions of socialism and worker uprisings coupled with criticisms of capitalism. But the real meat of the story is in it's portrayal of small-town life. At the time, and I guess it's still common today (if you live in cities), country and small town life is idealized as simpler and slower-paced. However, Lewis portrays the townsfolk as provincial and sanctimoniously petty in their gossip and back-stabbing, and frequently hypocritical. He isn't always kind to the city-dwellers either, and it's this societal critique that makes the book such an interesting read.

But he also makes frequent contrasts between how different people view things. Carol revels in the spring wildflowers but a passing farmer comments on the new wheat that is almost 5 inches. After Carol and Will return from an extended trip away all he sees are the improvements that people have made while Carol sees only the garbage and shabbiness of late winter. And Carol reflects on how proper and prim the storefronts on Main Street are, while their backs are weedy and full of rotting wood and vegetables, an obvious allusion to hypocritical townsfolk. One of the enduring messages by book's end seems to be that change takes time.

I was initially very much put off by this biting portrayal, and didn't want to like the book. The plot seems thin and lacking in direction which made the book feel longer than it is (about 450 pages, or 16.5 hours in the audio book I listened to). But I was surprised to identify with some of the characters, sometimes Carol, sometimes Kennicott, sometimes others. There seem to be a lot of layers to the story, as well, from social criticisms to political, differences between men and women, and observations about marriage and family, and I found that a lot of the aspects of the story are still very pertinent to our lives today. In the end I enjoyed this book much more than I had intended. I listened to the audio book format read by Brian Emerson who does a wonderful job reading - his voice lends itself very well to a story about small-town America and to me, he is the voice of Will Kennicott.