I've longed to read a Sinclair Lewis novel for ages, and at last, I managed to do so. This year, 2020, conveniently happens to mark the 100th anniversary since the publication of Main Street in 1920.

Lewis's Main Street is emblematic of all the Main Streets throughout the United States, not just his fictional town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Incorporating the descriptions of two writers, the book is both "a critique of capitalism through a feminist lens" (Emily J.) and "the deconstruction of the myth regarding small-town America" (U. of Michigan).

The protagonist, Carol, is a forerunner of today's modern feminist. Although I found her annoying at times (particularly in her inability to be satisfied), I also valued her eagerness to expose some of the absurd beliefs and behaviors of the people in Gopher Prairie.

For instance, when Carol and her husband Will argue, she remarks, "So the whole thing was illegal--and led by the sheriff! Precisely how do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?" (p. 407).

Opposing "Carol the Reformer" is "Will the Traditionalist." While Carol desires to reform Gopher Prairie and assist its citizens in attaining some sort of indistinct enlightenment, Will has no inclination to change anything. He appreciates Gopher Prairie as it is and only wishes to save up sufficient money so that he and Carol can live comfortably in their old age.

As you can envision, Carol's and Will's substantial differences cause friction in their marriage, and they struggle to understand each other.

Lewis is an extremely talented writer and is particularly proficient in creating tension between the sexes: both marital tension and sexual tension. During certain scenes, I was reminded of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence.

Lewis describes scenes with minute precision, far more than most contemporary writers. Although he can overdo it with some of his descriptions, he occasionally utters a line that is absolutely flawless. For example: “But at home he pinches a nickel till the buffalo drips blood.” (p. 300).

It takes approximately 60 pages for Lewis to "set the stage," but once all the elements are in place, the story becomes captivating and a pleasure to read. Overall, it's a great book that remains relevant today--despite being 100 years old.

I truly relished this book on multiple levels.

The theme of a young, intelligent girl marrying a country doctor and later being discontented with her marriage is clearly an homage to 'Madame Bovary'. However, the story is distinct not only due to the time and culture of its setting but also because of the characters themselves.

The main character, Carol, doesn't so much miss the glitz and glamour of a big city as she does the intellectual discourse and discussions of the arts that she can find in a more urban environment. Although she has her crushes and near affairs, she sort of realizes that it's not another man she desires but a different life.

I also appreciate that several chapters are dedicated to the narratives of other characters. A clever aspect is seeing Carol's first impression of the town of Gopher Prairie after moving from Minneapolis compared to Bea, the Swedish immigrant who comes from a much smaller town with fewer facilities.

In another chapter, Sinclair Lewis gives Carol's husband, Will Kennicott, a voice, which adds another layer of depth to the story. While he is a man of simple needs, he is also a sympathetic character, a good and brave person who is truly dedicated to his calling as a doctor. By allowing us to like and understand Will to some extent, we can also fathom Carol's mixed feelings towards him as her husband.

I also like this book from two historical perspectives. The first obvious one is the description of small town America in the first half of the last century. Personally, this really appealed to me because of my recent discovery of my own American roots, ironically enough in a place called Buffalo Prairie. I knew nothing about the American side of my family story, so I really enjoyed being able to envision them in a setting like this. (Although, I suppose my family would be those German farmers who feature prominently as props in this novel.)

The other thing I adored was the occasional antiquated use of language. How can one not love a novel written at a time when hotdogs were such a new craze that they were written in quotations and when at the train station Will says he'll call for a'machine' and you realize he's referring to a taxi.

All in all, it's a beautifully written story that contains one of the saddest paragraphs I've ever read in my life. ***The smallest of spoilers***

When elderly Champ Perry's wife passes away, he is, as the book states, a broken man. Carol really seems to be the only one who notices how devastated he is by the loss of his life partner. She spies him one day at the cemetery:

"Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw mound as if to protect her from the cold, her whom he had carefully covered up every night for sixty years, who was alone there now, uncared for."

So, it's definitely a thumbs up and the motivation I needed to read more of Lewis's works, especially that electronic version of 'Babbit' that has been gathering dust bytes.

I figured it was about time, after sixty years on planet earth, that I read a book by Sinclair Lewis. Probably one of the reasons I never did was because after all the literature classes I took, none of his work was ever discussed.

In 1930, Mr. Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature, and "Main Street" was mentioned as one of his great accomplishments.

Mr. Lewis is the type of writer I am usually attracted to. His writing is very descriptive like many of my favorite writers like Conrad, Proust, and Fitzgerald. However, the first 100 pages of "Main Street" were like looking at a one-minute sequence of a car passing down the same street 100 times. I was seriously thinking of putting it down when it seriously exploded off the pages and the main character, Carol Kennicott, starts to really come to life. She almost has an affair with a young tailor whose ambition is to be some type of artist.

She originally moved to the town of 'Gopher Prairie' when she married her husband Will Kennicott, a wonderful and dedicated doctor and a lifelong resident of the town. He's smart but in none of the ways that Carol is interested in. He's interested in medicine, making money, and taking care of cars. Carol loves to read the poetry of Keats and Shelley, and many of the famous authors of her era which is the early 1900's and before.

What Will sees as wonderful, she sees as dull. She wants to change the character and substance of the town, but all the residents are like Will and see little wrong with their lovely town that Carol finds dull and backwards.

Mr. Lewis' ability to create a small town in Minnesota is almost picture perfect. After the first one hundred pages, when the characters become energized, with conscious feelings about sex, loss of youth, and complacency, and the real evil that can be caused by gossip and false beliefs come to a boiling head, I was hoping the book would go on for another one hundred pages.

I am now fully engaged with the story and the characters, and I can't wait to see how it all unfolds. I'm sure there will be more twists and turns, and I'm eager to discover what lies ahead for Carol and the people of Gopher Prairie.

This book has really opened my eyes to the talent of Sinclair Lewis, and I'm looking forward to reading more of his work in the future. I highly recommend "Main Street" to anyone who enjoys a good story about small-town life and the struggles of individuals to find their place in the world.

I was truly intrigued by the themes presented in this book.

Even over 90 years after its publication, the novel remains remarkably relevant. The protagonist, Carrie, grapples with the challenge of avoiding the monotony of a quiet, midwestern existence while progressivism thrives in the vibrant cities she once inhabited.

I could empathize with many of her emotions - the sense of stagnation and dullness in the countryside compared to the excitement of urban life. In the 1910s, suburbs as we know them today didn't really exist, but her feelings paralleled my own experiences of living in a city versus the suburbs.

Moreover, political discussions about what is "radical" versus "progressive" and "morally obligated" versus "socially instituted" will always be pertinent to the world. Some of the struggles and debates in the novel, regarding socialism, women's rights, and the definition of education, bear an eerie resemblance to the current political climate.

It's also fascinating to observe how the attitudes of older and younger generations towards each other remain relatively unchanged. Overall, I understand that some people might not enjoy this novel - it can be tiresome in parts and frustrating in others.

However, if you've ever pondered your role in society and how you, as an individual, can contribute to making incremental changes in the world, this book is definitely worth exploring.

I was recently plagued by insomnia.

Oh, this has nothing to do with the book. What I need to do is to write something down randomly to mitigate the guilt of wasting time.

The book is a would-be hardcover for me. I mean, it was still on the way being transported here when I bought it online last month. And to my dismay, I haven't got the slightest idea where it was stranded for now. Ironically, I felt relieved of its delayed delivery because I am not quite poised to challenge the great odds that reading the book would exhaust and inflict me a lot. I am sure it would.

I frequently let my instinct be my guide when choosing a book. There must be occasions when you catch first sight of a book and have an inextricable feeling that it is the one you need to know. You sense you want to understand it better and feel the connection was preordained somehow. Well, that is it.

The instinct for books derives from my own perception of the world around and personal experience. My perceptions cannot always be right, but they are exactly what I could perceive under current conditions. We are always prisoners of circumstances.

I don't know if Main Street was a Dogville-kind book. What I could interpret from its brief introduction is darkness and disillusionment, whether it's about the dark side of human nature or a rustic disillusionment or something else. Disillusionment, a word I kinda favor, is a morbid lost world where once you enter, there is no going back.

Will detail the review after reading, perhaps, perhaps…if it won't have consumed me enormously and too painfully.

I understand that Main Street is a classic and an important comment on the small town society in the 1920's. However, when it comes to the way the comment was delivered, I found it rather monotonous, repetitive, and depressing. Carol Kennicott, who has been trapped in the narrow-minded Gopher Prairie, is not only unhappy but also incredibly frustrated. Although I agree with her progressive motives, I think that her up-and-down moments are all that fill the pages of the story. And by the way, this story never resolves her struggle to advance herself. Just when you think she is determined to make a difference, she is easily conquered. And just when you think she has given up, she bounces back with a need to make herself heard. This pattern occurs over and over again.

As well as that, I couldn't help but feel that she holds herself higher than the rest of the characters. Yes, the other characters may be simple and gossip-driven, but adamantly putting herself in charge of changing them for the better comes across as high-handed. Her situation is indeed unfortunate, but just when you think she might have a breakthrough, she is kicked down once more. Even when she finds her "freedom" in Washington, it's not what she had imagined. It seems that nothing will ever make her happy, even when she does get her way. Main Street made me feel as if I were pushing against a wall that would not budge, and in the end, the wall is still standing. Perhaps that is how Mrs. Kennicott felt, but as a reader, I would have preferred to have read about something other than the dull details of the wall and the pointless pushing of Carol Kennicott.

A young woman hailing from the Twin Cities ties the knot and relocates to a diminutive town in Minnesota. However, she soon comes to regret her choice as she discovers the townspeople to be extremely narrow-minded. This is the end of the story.

If there was anything more to this tiring book, I failed to perceive it. It is mean-spirited and repetitive, dragging on for a whopping 400 pages, without a single captivating character in sight.

If Sinclair Lewis has lost his popularity, I can understand the reason. His work seems to lack the charm and depth that would engage the reader.

The story fails to draw the audience in and instead leaves them feeling unfulfilled and disappointed. It is a prime example of a book that could have been better with more careful planning and development.

Perhaps Lewis was trying to make a statement about small-town life, but it comes across as forced and unconvincing. In the end, this book is a miss and not one that I would recommend to others.

(1920) A would-be romantic heroine ties the knot with a pleasant, albeit complacent, country doctor and despises her provincial existence. I scoured the internet to determine if Lewis was deliberately drawing inspiration from Flaubert, but alas, no. When others inevitably made the comparison, he claimed he had never read Bovary. I tend to believe him. There is a parallel evolution in literary creation. However, unfortunately, in the eyes of the reader, ignorance is no excuse. You can sense the trouble festering in this book from a great distance, yet lack sympathy because, really, haven't these people read Bovary? I thought the protagonist Carol was supposed to have a passion for French literature.

I confess I wasn't in the right frame of mind for this book – for a love/hate social critique of middle America. After just 5 pages, I realized I still had my fill from reading Revolutionary Road a year ago. Is there anything more passé than poking fun at American boosterism and wholesomeness? Oh, look, a building with portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington inside, ho ho ho. I know it's all in good fun, but Lewis didn't truly understand how good he had it.

“Watch my smoke—”

Lewis' next novel, Babbitt, did it better. (In fact, it was sheer genius. I must read it again). But it was also draining. (Brilliant yet tiring reportedly described the author himself. It's actually insane to hear about his nature. Everything I've read makes him sound like some sort of human geyser, or a cross between Noel Coward, a deformed carnival barker with multiple personality disorder, and a demonic jack-in-the-box). Like Babbitt, Main Street is hyperreal. “The amount of sheer data is amazing!” F Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Lewis. “Data” sums it all up. Lewis spews out information at you like a computer, high-processing and deaf. It's a pity, too, because the nice bits of writing get lost in the deluge. This is why the ancients emphasized proportionality in art.

It can be taxing. Almost every review here concurs that it is and awards 4 stars partly because Lewis does manage to pull it all together by the end and partly, I think, out of relief to be finished with it. So if you're going to read the book, I suggest you skim the descriptions without attempting to visualize them and the catalogue of characters without bothering to memorize the names, since I don't think Lewis cared one way or the other. Once that's sorted, you can start barreling through the pages of this loquacious novel. The problem then becomes – what for? It's like racing into the boundless Midwestern plains, directionless and monotonous. Carol thinks her town is ugly and dull and is constantly shocked that no one else seems to care. That's both the conflict and the theme, explored from every conceivable angle. It's very slight. With a couple of notable exceptions, the action is childishly small (“Let's put on a play!”) and one-note, yet the book is 500 pages long. If Carol, a well-meaning but hopeless poser with no inner life, is bored with the town, we're bored with her. The town is a riot compared to her. (Her major deficiency, incidentally, is in stick-to-itiveness, a Gopher Prairie virtue). Through some mouthpieces, Lewis savages Carol beautifully, but none of it has any impact on her incessant whining.

Still, she's relatively harmless, like all the characters here. And the author seems to be sympathetic. Carol's adolescent rants may not have been Lewis', but in a way, they kind of are. As much as he supposedly cut from this novel (written in 3 and a half months), indulgences like those, and many more, should have been excised. Also, some of the speeches Lewis inserts into the dialogue are cheesy, in that wide-eyed, stagey, dated manner.

A lengthy warm-up exercise for Babbitt. So why 3 stars? Because the characters are amusing and say things like buttinski. Because Lewis comes across (in his fiction at least) as likable, quick-witted, and always fair-minded. Because of the many beautifully human moments, and the vivid journey back in time to the 1910s. And because of this timeless quote:

“She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics.”

——

Marginalia:

It was somewhat disorienting to read a reference here to Sherwood Anderson. It's interesting to contrast Main Street and Winesburg, which were published back-to-back. And it made me think about how those years witnessed Midwestern authors take the publishing world by storm:

Magnificent Ambersons 1918

My Antonia 1918

Winesberg, Ohio 1919

Main Street 1920

Babbitt 1922

The Great Gatsby 1925

The Sun Also Rises 1926

The publication of ''Main Street'' holds a significant place in American literary history, ranking alongside ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' as one of the rare literary events that also became political and social phenomena. This book sold an astonishing hundreds of thousands of copies. Just like with the Stowe novel, Americans eagerly embraced what seemed to be a harsh critique of themselves. They were more than ready to read it, form their judgments, and engage in discussions. Lewis wasted no time and followed up with a series of other remarkable works. ''Babbitt'' lampooned American boosterism, ''Arrowsmith'' delved into the corruption within science and medical research, and ''Elmer Gantry'' targeted revivalism and organized religion in general. Each of these books was a huge success, selling fantastically. Americans simply couldn't stop paying attention to their home-grown ''scold,'' as Lewis himself affectionately called himself.

If I were to rank the three books by Lewis that I've read so far, I would place this one in second position. ''Babbitt'' takes the lead, closely followed by ''Main Street,'' and then ''It Can't Happen Here.'' I thoroughly enjoyed all three and truly wish they were more widely read. I would have loved to have studied something by Lewis in a literature class during my college days. The social critique aspect of his work is of such great importance that without some historical context, I'm certain I'm missing out on a great deal. However, even without a complete understanding of the social context in which his works were written, I still appreciate Lewis' tone as a self-proclaimed scold. His ability to penetrate the ordinary actions of daily life and find ways to question and draw attention to the universal, humorous, and depressing aspects of the way people live is what I enjoy the most about his writing. In this regard, I often find myself comparing Lewis' style to that of Garrison Keillor. He's not without hope, but rather a somewhat dour curmudgeon with a sharp eye for what makes people and society seem ridiculous.

If you were a young woman just starting to live, with a very peculiar dream, and you meet a man who offers you a dream, and it turns out to be the very same one you had hidden inside you.

This is what happens to Carol, a nonconformist young woman who ends up married to a rural doctor and living in a small town in Minnesota.

There is a town, there is a main street, there is a woman who wants to reform this town and transform it, there is an innocent society formed by remarkable men and women who would never allow it, there is a mature rural doctor who knew how to read the dream printed on an adorable little face and who offered it as an attainable reality, who wrapped it in convincing words, in half-realities, who used it as a bait to conquer, to trap some fine, soft, delicate dolls, and put on them chains as heavy as they are invisible.

There is a feeling of suffocation that persists, there is a network of women aligned with the healthy idea that being married encloses an end and a means to happiness, there is a constant restlessness in the now married young woman, there is an opportunity that is glimpsed, there is a route of escape towards a city, any one that is not this petrified town, wrapped in its puritanical candor, there is a last move that the doctor makes, hoping to recapture that woman who is no longer so young, no longer so beautiful, but who still wants to be someone different from the wife of a doctor in a lost town in Minnesota.

There was a dream, a promise, once it existed, it was conceived in the mind of a young woman, she pursued it as if it were achievable until she discovered that it was only a chimera, a desire that would never become a reality.

Grit and perseverance are two qualities that I truly believe in. They are what got me through the first half of this brilliant book. I was determined to keep reading, no matter how difficult it might get.

However, as I reached the middle of the book, something strange happened. I kinda died of boredom and lost the will to live and read. It was as if all the energy had been sucked out of me.

But then, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, murder mystery novels came to my rescue. They reignited my passion for reading and gave me a new lease on life.

Now, I can't get enough of them. They keep me on the edge of my seat, guessing and speculating until the very end. Thanks to murder mystery novels, I have found my love for reading again.

Sinclair Lewis is a renowned American writer who delves deep into the complex emotions of love and hate towards small midwestern American towns in his works.

He presents these towns not only as the backdrop but also as integral characters in his stories. Through his vivid descriptions and nuanced portrayals, he showcases the charm and simplicity that often attract people to these small towns. However, he also uncovers the hidden flaws, narrow-mindedness, and social constraints that can breed resentment and dissatisfaction.

Lewis's exploration of this love-hate relationship is not just a mere observation but a profound commentary on the human condition. By presenting these small towns as women's fiction, he adds an extra layer of depth and complexity to his narratives. He allows readers to see the world through the eyes of female characters, who often face unique challenges and opportunities in these small towns.

Overall, Sinclair Lewis's work offers a rich and multi-faceted view of small midwestern American towns, making it a must-read for anyone interested in American literature and the human experience.