Review by Edward Tanguay October 7, 1995

Just like poor Carol's life, the book is not very interesting. Nothing is happening. The most exciting character is the Red Swede and I find myself struggling through the text waiting for him to pop back in the story so that I can escape the out-back small town boredom. He is the one on fire to change things, not Carol. Carol can't make up her mind if she wants to change the town or not. She keeps going through moods ranging from loyal housewife:

She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world. to frustration:

She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the security of a great city. Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were ludicrous. Oozing out from every drab wall, she felt a forbidding spirit which she could never conquer. and back again: She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her career as doctor's-wife.

These fluctuations are interspersed with moments of inconsiderable improvements such as her failed attempts to get Kennicott to appreciate poetry or her attempts to get the Thanatopsis club to actually read literature. But Carol remains in the most part ineffectual in her goals.

Only Bjornstam, the Red Swede, has the right attitude:

You see, I'm not interested in these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keep up. You have to love this "attitude a la Perot" and one can only hope that he will have some positive influence on Carol. It looks promising, as he has hooked up with her maid and has begun to make comments to Carol about her upcoming play:

Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night he was sitting on the back steps. Once when Carol appeared he grumbled, "Hope you're going to give this burg one good show. If you don't reckon nobody ever will."

Edward Tanguay

*** Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
*** Notes on second half by Edward Tanguay
*** October 15, 1995

Reading this book, one soon sees Carol as a time bomb, ticking, waiting to get out of this town and realize her vague dreams of culture and the finer things in life. She's always searching for a way out. She sees a way out in different things and people, including . . .

Trains! At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there remained a world beyond. her son:

"I feel like an old woman, with a skin like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it! He is perfect. He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best, Harvard or Yale or Oxford?"

and through Erik:

Yet in him she had discovered both her need of youth and the fact that youth would welcome her. It was not Erik to whom she must escape, but universal and joyous youth, in class-rooms, in studios, in offices, in meetings to protest against Things in General . . . But universal and joyous youth rather resembled Erik.

There seems to be a type of schizophrenia in Carol. In one paragraph she is burning for that certain cultural je ne sais quoi to give meaning to her life and in the next paragraph she is a practical housewife happy to stand by her man, especially when she becomes more maternal when the baby arrives. In the second half of the book, the small-town gossip and its debilitating power eventually forces Carol over the edge and out of town. Although one can notice two sides in Carol, Mark Schorer suggests in the afterword of my book that Sinclair Lewis actually put the two sides of his own nature in the two characters Carol and Kennicott. Carol is the culture-seeking romantic dreamer while Kennicott is the practical, understanding, down-to-earth bread-winner. I found it significant that Kennicott was so practical and simple himself, yet so understanding of his wife's whims. This view of him solidified when he picked Erik and her up from their walk and instead of scolding her for affair-like actions, simply states that she should be careful or the town's people will gossip her to her ruin the way they did the local school teacher. I find not only Carol to be a very modern woman (especially for 1920!) but also that Kennicott is a very modern man. How many husbands today are willing to allow their wife to take the kid and leave for an undetermined amount of time to the big city to live a more exciting life, giving her the money to do it, and then staying at home for two years waiting for her to come back? Kennicott gives his wife ultimate freedom and respects her rights to an extent that surpass today's standards (for instance, it isn't even clear in the book from WHOM she conceived her second child while in D.C.!). In this way, Lewis does not present us a simple story of a trapped woman trying to get out of a boring town being held back by an old-fashioned husband, but he presents us with two new character roles for the future, i.e. for the 20th-century, post-World-War-I world. As Mark Schorer mentioned in his afterword, this novel cannot be separated from the time in which it takes place: 1906 to 1920. These years saw the last gasps of the belle epoch and the monarchies along with the social and political values which went down with them. Lewis presents to us a new model of freedom for woman, understanding for men, and even rights for children:

"Did you ever realize that children are people?" "That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the conversation." "No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him."

Lewis even uncannily and quite correctly predicts that the children of his day are going to create a radically different world:

She led him to the nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars.

The second part of this book was much better than the first part in that after having set up the boring setting of Gopher Prairie, he was able to inject a little satire and American towns in general:

Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another. Always, west of Pittsburgh, and often, east of it, there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same box-like houses and two-story shops. The new, more conscious houses are alike in their very attempts at diversity . . . and about long-held beliefs: She understood consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about having Hugh christened: "I refuse to insult my baby and myself by asking an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, to permit me to have him! I refuse to subject him to any devil-chasing rites! If I didn't give my baby--my baby--enough sanctification in those nine hours of hell, then he can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!"

Kennicott was my favorite character in this book because of the unexpected way he reacted to his wife's pleas and desires. I don't know that I've ever experienced a character with such an open and giving love for someone (Jesus maybe?). Yet he's not stupid. He knows that money has to be made and he does his job well. And he even keeps his sense of humor:

"I see. Well, of course, I'll be tickled to death to sell out my practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have me go with you to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear velveteen pants and a woman's bonnet, and live on spaghetti?"

He even knew all along about Carol's affair with Erik, yet he didn't say anything. The best description of Kennicott in the book is one by Carol when she is talking to another woman who suggested that Kennicott might be cheating on her:

Carol was furious. "I don't pretend that Will has no faults. But one thing I do know: He's as simple-hearted about what you call 'goings-on' as a babe. And if he ever were such a sad dog as to look at another woman, I certainly hope he'd have the spirit enough to do the tempting, and not be coaxed into it, as in your depressing picture!"

And the picture of him standing on the platform watching her ride out of his life is priceless:

The last thing she saw on the station platform was Kennicott, faithfully waving his hand, his face so full of uncomprehending loneliness that he could not smile but only twitch up his lips.

I enjoyed the book. Not because of the plot (the plot was boring) but because I feel that the personalities of Carol and Kennicott and their relationship to each other cast light on how 20th century lifestyles and relationships have changed and are changing. This book should be required reading for couples with two conflicting careers. Also, Lewis paints a memorable portrait of the American small town. Anybody who grew up in an American small town can relate to Gopher Prairie and its bland and sheltered atmosphere. One can easily imagine Lewis' "thousand Gopher Prairies" scattered across America, each one looking the same way, each one with people who do the same things, and in each one with a Carol wanting to do the same thing that this Carol did: get out!

Edward Tanguay

Send your review on this book to The Online Reading Club.
Find out which books we are currently reading.