Reviews for Main Street

The average rating for Main Street based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-16 00:00:00 Kathleen G Pipes On page 25 I thought - this guy is brilliant. On page 50 I thought - this guy is exhaustively brilliant. On page 100 I thought - I'm exhausted. On page 150 I thought - I'll never get out of this novel alive. On page 200 I thought - so who knew there could be so much DETAIL about every last possible aspect of one teensy Minnesotan town lodged inside the Tardis-like head of Sinclair Lewis? On page 213 my eye fell upon this : It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street. I must go on. But I can't! Surprisingly Godotesque, and I imagine many readers of this large opus nodding their heads and smiling grimly. On page 350 I thought - you know, I think the plot is picking up a little bit. If I'm reading this right, two things have actually happened in the last 70 pages. THE DIRENESS OF SMALL TOWNS Well, that's what this novel is ALL about. "Tell you, Carrie : there's just three classes of people : folks that haven't got any ideas at all; the cranks that kick about everything; and Regular Guys, the fellows with sticktuitiveness that boost and get the world's work done." It (what's so bad about a small town) is a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment…the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living of the restless walking. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is negation canonised as the one positive virtue. It is slavery self-taught and self-defended. It is dullness made God. There's a point on page 249 where Sinclair is ONCE again recounting how much his heroine hates Gopher Prairie, and kind of breaks down into a general jeremiad without even trying to put his thoughts into her mind. He just starts foaming and ranting. The universal similarity - that is the physical expression of the philosophy of dull safety. Nine-tenths of American small towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to the other. Always there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same…. (etc etc for a long paragraph). THE VICIOUS GOSSIP OF SMALL TOWNS "Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins and Cy Bogart?" "I'm sure it is a lie." "Oh, it probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness. DIALECT : NOT A GOOD IDEA "Vell, so you come to town," "Ya. Ay get a yob." "Vell…you got a fella now?" "Ya, Yim Yacobsen." "Vell. I'm glat to see you. How much you vant a veek?" "Sex dollar." "There ain't nobody pay dat. Vait! Dr Kennicott. I t'ink he marry a girl from de Cities. Maybe she pay dat. Vell, You go take a valk." Authors, don't do this. You are giving the impression that anyone who speaks with an accent is tuppence short of a shilling. AMY ADAMS FOR CAROL, I'D SAY This is a novel about a perky and by all accounts fairly drop dead young woman named Carol who marries a guy who is a country doctor and is so eyejabbingly tedious that I was surprised she was still alive at the end of one year of marriage when there was in the small town of Gopher Prairie a full supply of sharp agricultural implements, guns with live ammo, and even a couple of four storey buildings which would surely bust your neck should you spring from their tops. She sashays into the her hubby's home town with grand but vague ideas of "improving" it. Well, you know that expression "don't let the bastards grind you down? Turns out the bastards live in Gopher Springs. Whole town is full of them. This is a novel where the idea is like James Joyce said with Ulysses, that if Dublin burned to the ground they could rebuild it by consulting his book. In this case it's all small towns in the north of the USA and all the interiors of every building - every square inch of Minnesota is gone over with utter thoroughness. I LIKE A GOOD LIST Sinclair Lewis is very big on lists. Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost to the laces, grey knitted scarves ten feet long, thick woollen socks, canvas jackets lineed with yellow wool like the plumage of ducklings, moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the blazing chapped wrists of boys… The Commercial Club banquet and the Minniemashie House, an occasion for menus printed in gold (but injudiciously proof-read) for free cigars, soft damp slabs of Lake Superior whitefish served as fillet of sole, drenched cigar-ashes gradually filling the saucers of coffe cups, and oratorical references to Pep, Punch, Go, Vigour, Enterprise, Red Blood, He-Men, Fair Women, God's Country, James J Hill, the Blue Sky, the Green Fields, the Bountiful Harvest, Increasing Population, Fair Return on Investments, Alien Agitators who Threaten the Security of our Institutions, the Hearthstone the Foundation of the State, Senator Knute Nelson, One Hundered Per Cent Americanism, and Pointing with Pride. When you follow a character into a room in Main Streetyou are lucky to escape without a complete inventory of furnishings and fixtures The trouble is that often grinding down poor Carol becomes indistinguishable from grinding down the poor reader. Sinclair Lewis falls into the trap that John Lennon did in his primal scream phase, say, on Cold Turkey and Mother. In his case it was yelling and moaning about what psychic pain he was in. In this case it's boring us half to death in protest about the psychological suffocation anyone with half a brain will suffer in these innumerable burgs. Cries of "All right already!" and "You've already said that twenty-five times Mr Lewis" may be heard escaping involuntarily from the reader's pursing lips. TWO MORE MOANERS 1. Surely a direct descendant of Main Street is Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, also located in Minnesota. Yes, GK paints his town with a wry avuncular affection, but in his first novel GK has his stand-in denounce Lake Wobegon remarkably bitterly in terms Sinclair Lewis would have thought he's written (except that GK is funnier). These come in a passage called 95 Theses 95. Here's three examples: You have subjected me to endless boring talk about the weather, regularity, back problems, and whether something happened in 1938 or 1939, insisting that I sit quietly and listen to every word. "How's it going with you?" you said. "Oh, about the same," you replied. "Cold enough for you?" It was always cold, always about the same. You have taught me to value a good night's sleep over all else including adventures of love and friendship, and even when the night is charged with magic, to be sure to get to bed. If God had not meant everyone to be in bed by ten-thirty, He would never have provided the ten o'clock newscast. You have provided me with poor male role models, including the Sons of Knute, the Boosters Club and others whose petulance, inertia, and ineptitude are legendary. I was taught to respect them: men who clung to tiny grudges for decades and were devoted to vanity, horsefeathers, small potatoes--not travel but the rites of trunk-loading and map-reading and gas mileage; not faith but the Building Committee; not love but supper. 2. Bizarrely, I could not but think of Thomas Bernhardt, whose legendary hatred of his own country Austria is poured forth in novel after novel. Main Street is in the same ball park. Except there's no love in Austria. IMMERSIVE NOVELS Are not read for the plot but for the forensic detail of lives lived. Because of that they run the risk of boring us rigid; they're the slow heavy beasts, the dray horses of literature - The Old Wives' Tale and A House for Mr Biswas; and now, Main Street. The whole thing is in the immense accretion of detail. They have to win you over. Main Street won me over. In the end I loved it. Whew. Ain't going to read another Sinclair Lewis novel any time soon, but... yeah.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-24 00:00:00 Steven Moneysmith Sinclair Lewis explores his love and hate of small midwestern American towns as women's fiction.