Book Review: Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis

Genre: Classic Literature
Date Published: 1920
Publisher: Modern Library
# Of Pages/Listening Time: 450 pgs/18 hours 30 minutes

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Synopsis: Hailed by scholars as "the most American of American novelists", Sinclair Lewis has been noted for his double gifts of satire and realism, as demonstrated in these two repackaged classics. "Main Street" tells the tale of a big-city girl who marries a physician and settles in a small town in the Midwest, only to fall victim to the narrow-mindedness and unimaginative natures of the town's residents.

My Rating:

 ★★★

.....For being a good (if slow) classic

My Thoughts:

This took forever to finish, which is always a bad sign for me. I had a hard time getting into it, and I felt I could guess the ending based on the first 20 pages. The plot felt very slow for most of the novel, and I couldn't relate to the protagonist Carol. Nor could I bring myself to like her husband Will Kennicott

With that being said, however, I can see why this is a good classic. The writing is genuinely very good, and I'm looking forward to checking out Sparknotes' book analysis of this novel, because I know I missed a couple of things. Someone else mentioned that this is a feminist novel, and I do agree with this. Sinclair Lewis gave us a female character who is struggling to make modern changes in a conservative town. She may not have really succeeded, but she made an effort. I would say it's a novel that really shows the hardships and barriers that the suffrage movement faced, with the encouragement that the best success lies in questioning the ways of your world, rather than forcing them to instantly change their attitudes and their environment.

I think this quote was well put:

"[It's] not a matter of heroism. [It's a] matter of endurance. Your Middlewest is double Puritan--prairie Puritan on top of New England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in it's heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow... Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctirne I know!"

In short, it's not the fist-pounding that will break down the barriers; it's the talking and questioning that will help create change.

All in all, this is a good piece of classic literature. I had a hard time getting into it and loving it, but I recognize it's import, and I know that others might enjoy it. A good book for a book club!