Thirty pages into Main Street the reader has a right to be puzzled: Is this a novel or a textbook on American culture? Every character, every idea, each physical scene is as familiar to us as is our hometown. There is nothing new or surprising; it's all been said before, over and over again. Until we remind ourselves: yes, it has, but Sinclair Lewis was the first to say it.
We, and much of the literate world, have wholly internalized Main Street. When we think of Main Street America (and to a large extent, mainstream America) we do not think of it in original or even contemporary terms; right down to the doctor, the preacher and the computer chip maker, when we take a look at the culture of the country, we do so through the lens of Main Street. No book comes to mind, including the Bible, that has so exclusively informed the mind of a people than has Sinclair Lewis's take on Gopher Prairie, Minnesota in the first decade of the 20th Century.
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of a doctor, and doctors and medicine would continue to play major roles in his novels. He attended college prep at Oberlin before moving on to Yale where he became editor of the school's literary magazine. If Lewis was ill-favored as a child-tall, ungainly, pop-eyed with a face scarred by acne-he did not improve with age, adding a rather nasty, loquacious disposition to his physical handicaps, a profile that led to some of his crueler Yale classmates to joke "he was the only man in New Haven who could fart out of his face." If we lend a Freudian interpretation to why writers write what they do, such trash talk deserves a mention, for no American writer has wielded a more wicked pen when writing of his compatriots and their manners than has Lewis. Lewis would nurture a decidedly progressive political stance as well, taking up his cudgel to bludgeon racists, bigots, misogynists and capitalists, all frequent targets in his many novels. And this willingness to shape his stories around reformist positions renders much of his work as relevant today as it was when written. Main Street's themes are all still with us, as are the Babbitts, the Elmer Gantrys, and the avaricious doctors Lewis so ruthlessly eviscerates in Arrowsmith, a novel that won him the Pulitzer Prize, which he refused1.
For all the fame and wealth Lewis won for his many best-sellers-Elmer Gantry, Babbitt and Main Street becoming the most iconic-it was the last mentioned that made his name and won him the Noble Prize, the first ever granted an American writer. Lewis was always way ahead of his times, and that is why he seemed prophetic to the Swedes and still does today: his prophesies of yesteryear were not only true for his own time, they became the truths of our own writ large.
Main Street is a novel of limitless detail, all of it bleak. It reads like a grim museum of early 20th Century America as it fingers the artifacts of life a century ago. Lewis gives us long lists of objects, buildings, animals, foods, seasons, and characters, everything that made up life in small towns at the time of the story. But all this detail is too extreme, too one-dimensional. Main Street is not a satire. Most of its characters, regardless of how they might be seen today, are not caricatures. Its two main characters, Carol Milford and Will Kennicott, and most of its minor characters are realistically drawn. (In the years I spent in rural America, I met most of them.) Yet beneath each passage, each character, lies Lewis's monopolizing theses parsed in degrees of yokalism. Main Street is a realistic novel where nothing seems quite real. It reads today more like stereotypical small town anecdotes and archetypes heard from afar and compiled to define a place, due once again to our cultural internalization of this novel. Of the major, and most of the major-minor characters, only the heroine Carol Kennicott gets favorable treatment (a character no doubt inspired by Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House, with a difference: Carol fights back). All of her class, the social elite of Gopher Prairie-the professionals and business men-are shown in negative light. On the other hand, their servants invariably get a good press. As does Erik Valborg, the village queer-Lewis's frank and sensitive treatment of this character is certainly a first in American literature-and the n'er-do-well Miles Bjornstam, the town's eccentric handyman, an intelligent, curious, unconventional atheist, Gopher Prairie's devil's advocate. Both are presented as whole, three-dimensional and sympathetic.2
If we are speaking of the art of the novel, the first 160 pages of Main Street are a one-dimensional bore, passage after narrated passage of descriptive scenes cataloguing Lewis's sociological themes. Mid-book we get another long essay on Gopher Prairie's shortcomings presented as if the insights here were new to the reader. We are burdened with ten passages on a subject when one or two would do. The town's reaction to Carol's plans for its renovation is told over and over again, exactly alike with a wealth of changed props and a different cast of characters. Add this to an unsettling unevenness inherent to the novel: fast on the heels of 200 pages of cold, dry exposition, we get a heartrending passage of a country doctor tending his far-flung flock in a northern prairie blizzard. Erik Valborg, perhaps the novel's most interesting character, is introduced way too late (on page 320 of a 430 page novel) in fully dramatized scenes, rare in this novel, showing the budding relationship between Erik and Carol. The two characters begin, finally, to take on flesh and blood while we can scarcely recall others who have been with us for 300 pages, they are that poorly drawn.
It is not until page 233 that we hear "...a Great War smote Europe" and get a fix on the time period covered by the novel. Not until Chapter 14, a third of the way into the book, do we hear Carol Kennicott reflect upon her life in Gopher Prairie, an interior monologue that morphs into the book's first tense dramatic scene between the antagonists, Carol and her husband Dr. Will, the two main characters that personify the novel's argument. Not until the introduction of Erik Valborg late in Chapter 28 does the story-a tale with plot-begin. On page 400, with just pages to go before the curtain falls, a new character is introduced.
Main Street cries out for a good editor, and after the phenomenal success of the novel-it went on to sell two million copies and still counting-Lewis no doubt got one. The structure of the novels to follow show a decided improvement, although Lewis's skill with words would never be remarkable. Literary gems can, however, be found among the dross:
Where would we find a more moving, and accurate, description of the Minnesota prairie in winter?
But Lewis's literary talent was not what won him the Nobel Prize; his insights into American culture did, while better writers at work in Lewis's time-Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos-did not. Take for instance:
And this:
And in consequence Carol gives this advice to Erik Valborg:
Insights written nearly a hundred years ago. Sinclair Lewis was the first to say it, and the social critics of America, and the world at large, are saying it still.
Main Street is an episodic novel girded on thesis. It reads like the treatise of a classic progressive way ahead of his time on every social issue: labor, race, women's rights and women's movements, taste, art and manners. Lewis was on the winning side of all of them. In years past, it was fashionable to compare Main Street to Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Critics focused on the most obvious feature these two novels have in common: life in a provincial town. But the comparison was way off base. Madame Bovary is far more than a study of life in a small place. That, as Mark Schorer has noted, "is only the setting [in Bovary] for a highly dramatic human catastrophe. But Main Street can not be lifted out of its historic setting, which is, in effect, the whole of it." We could go on to say that if we do lift the novel out of its setting, we are left with a very long essay on the need for sweeping change in America.
When Lewis wrote Main Street, small town America was already in economic decline. Lewis was aware of this, and he prophesied why it was happening. He speaks of "monorails" carrying the workers from places like Gopher Prairie to the cities, of the residents of these dull little towns drifting west to California out of boredom, of the decline of the `market towns' as the consumers who made them thrive either moved to the cities or boarded the "monorail" or their "flivver" to go shopping in the big city. But the Gopher Prairies of the Midwest would survive, even if their satellite villages would not.
I recently spent a nostalgic afternoon in Sauk Centre visiting the shrines to Sinclair Lewis-in fact, the town itself is has become a shrine to its famous son: there's the Sinclair Lewis Society; Sinclair Lewis Park; Sinclair Lewis Campground; the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center with its small Sinclair Lewis Museum at the edge of town. His boyhood home on Third Street has been lovingly preserved; The Main Street Theater built, and named, in 1939, is still there; and of course Main Street itself made sacred and indestructible by the native son who scorned it. Sauk Centre today is still very much on the map, owed in part to its famous son and its proximity to Interstate 94. It is a town of 4,000 with a Main Street not as vital as in Lewis's day, but still there and most of the shops dealing in something or other, anything that Wal-Mart is not selling cheaper out on the edge of town. A walk down Main Street shows that by 1910, the time of Main Street's story, the town was already undergoing many of the physical changes that Main Street claims it is lacking and that constitute one of novel's major themes. Carol Kennicott bewails the tacky appearance of the town when in fact, if we take as example the First National Bank building, AD 1900, erected a decade before Carol arrived to fault the town, its neo-Egyptian facade is as good, on a smaller scale, as anything being done in Minneapolis, a city that Lewis holds up as a model of progressive development. The Hanson and Emerson building, as well as St. Paul's Catholic and the Episcopalian Neo-Gothic church, all standing when Lewis chose the time for his account of the town, demonstrate that Gopher Prairie as it appears in Main Street is in fact what it might have been a generation earlier.
The town's Main Street Museum displays a number of quotes referring to Sinclair Lewis. The one that caught my eye speaks of Lewis as a "...critic of American culture in a great number of poor novels." There's a lot of truth is this. It's amazing that Lewis got Main Street published. But in 1920 it was a different publishing world. We once had independent publishers, some of whom were keen on taking chances, on insisting there must be wheat beneath the chaff, a groundwork of ideas underpinning the popular entertainment. Main Street today, despite its revolutionary investigation of American life, would be rejected for `editorializing'-from beginning to end, the book does that-while the writer with nothing to say but saying it well would see his book in print. And it is for this reason that readers in search of novels that treat moral, political and social issues, works that speak to the human condition in some meaningful manner, return to Lewis, despite his flaws, and the great novels of world literature because they find so little contemporary fiction that holds their interest. So much of today's fiction, even from `literary' writers, remains shallow investigations of the subjective minutiae accruing to the lives of inconsequential characters with no larger import, when people, at least people worth writing about, now and always have expended much of their energy on issues that transcend their small subjective struggles. (And the fiction writers who do make theme, thesis and idea important aspects of their novels are most often those with the least talent for plot.) One wants to remind today's publishers that literary fiction is not in competition with modern romance or the pop novel or with TV melodramas. A horde of intelligent, literate readers out there are not being served by this sometimes decently written but vapid fiction. If today a well-structured novel that engages the intellect does make it through the filter, it is more often released in paperback, ensuring that it will likely not be reviewed in the national media. Thus, the novel sinks into oblivion, and the reader in search of the cerebral and entertaining novel retreats to the literary storehouse of the past.3
Main Street. Flawed or not, read it we must. Sinclair Lewis's views of American life were too successful. If his books when read today seem overly obvious and his treatment of his themes seems like beating a dead dog, that is true because they have become the canon by which the literate of his and all succeeding generations judge American culture. Lewis can not be ignored.
© 2009 by Hugh Mahoney.