Main Street

Rating:
Summary: Cut in half for the love of. . .
Review: It could have been better if it had been cut more then it already had been done. The basic premise and satire of the novel was a good one but it was overly done and trying to make his point about the town jumped around at times too much, as if he wanted to expose the small town for its bad nature but yet love the town for its simpleton ways. There were some good Characters, Carol was not completely the great heroine nor was she the evil incarnate, and Miles was good as well, the others were one sided more than these two as Lewis was trying to hard for an expose.

Rating:
Summary: An important cultural observation
Review: Lewis was an enormously successful writer in the 1920s (really on the same level as Hemmingway and Fitzgerald), but he has faded and is hardly read today. This, however, has no bearing on the importance of his writing. His writings reveal the social realities and concerns of his time. He focuses on individuals not communities (not bound together in any organic way). He is also skeptical about success and the American dream. There is a real sense of contempt toward the middle-class in Lewis. He really fills in a gap in The Great Gatsby, which included old money, new money, and the working class, but where is the middle class. As a result, Lewis' is famous for satirizing the middle class.
Lewis wrote Main Street in 1920. In short it examines the big cities reaction against the small town. He idealizes rural America as the strength of America in the 19th century. And, in the 1920s more Americans are living in metropolitan areas than in small towns for the first time in this country's history. Lewis reverses the romantic view of the rural, bucolic America and portrays it as ignorant. He caught a key strand in American life. Many thousands of Americans were once rural dwellers who moved to the big cities, and they or their neighbors were reading Main Street.

Rating:
Summary: An important cultural observation
Review: Lewis was an enormously successful writer in the 1920s (really on the same level as Hemmingway and Fitzgerald), but he has faded and is hardly read today. This, however, has no bearing on the importance of his writing. His writings reveal the social realities and concerns of his time. He focuses on individuals not communities (not bound together in any organic way). He is also skeptical about success and the American dream. There is a real sense of contempt toward the middle-class in Lewis. He really fills in a gap in The Great Gatsby, which included old money, new money, and the working class, but where is the middle class. As a result, Lewis' is famous for satirizing the middle class.
Lewis wrote Main Street in 1920. In short it examines the big cities reaction against the small town. He idealizes rural America as the strength of America in the 19th century. And, in the 1920s more Americans are living in metropolitan areas than in small towns for the first time in this country's history. Lewis reverses the romantic view of the rural, bucolic America and portrays it as ignorant. He caught a key strand in American life. Many thousands of Americans were once rural dwellers who moved to the big cities, and they or their neighbors were reading Main Street.

Rating:
Summary: a strange book but a hooker
Review: Lol. A strange book but I wanted to read it because I live in a hellhole in the Midwest and having come from a more sophisticated town previously this place was kinda a shock. Wanted to see if there were some parallels, but times have changes a lot since then. The Scandinavians reminded me more of Poles then Americans. I guess American culture really has developed into its own flavor. I could relate with Carol but she was too intellectually snub for me at times. She pissed me off with her mouth full of words and her actionless feet. However I suppose a lot of youth can relate with that. We all have these ideals yet fail to live up to them. Perhaps she reached too high? But I had to finish the book because I wanted to know if she would stay in Gopher Prairie. The book is funny at times, yet I'm not up for much sarcasm. It gets on my nerves. I like the part about the public WC being such a jewel in GP, the pride of it. LOl, that was hilarious. I think the book would've been funner if I knew more about the times yet perhaps I was expecting something else. Actually you can be pretty nieve like me and still like it especially if you're a foreinger because many of the charcters reminded me of typical Polish ways, which are so funny at times.

Rating:
Summary: a strange book but a hooker
Review: Lol. A strange book but I wanted to read it because I live in a hellhole in the Midwest and having come from a more sophisticated town previously this place was kinda a shock. Wanted to see if there were some parallels, but times have changes a lot since then. The Scandinavians reminded me more of Poles then Americans. I guess American culture really has developed into its own flavor. I could relate with Carol but she was too intellectually snub for me at times. She pissed me off with her mouth full of words and her actionless feet. However I suppose a lot of youth can relate with that. We all have these ideals yet fail to live up to them. Perhaps she reached too high? But I had to finish the book because I wanted to know if she would stay in Gopher Prairie. The book is funny at times, yet I'm not up for much sarcasm. It gets on my nerves. I like the part about the public WC being such a jewel in GP, the pride of it. LOl, that was hilarious. I think the book would've been funner if I knew more about the times yet perhaps I was expecting something else. Actually you can be pretty nieve like me and still like it especially if you're a foreinger because many of the charcters reminded me of typical Polish ways, which are so funny at times.

Rating:
Summary: Main Street: Still alive today.
Review: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis is a classic novel about a woman who feels trapped in her small town life. Coming from a little village on the prairie much like the one described by Lewis, I very much identified with this book and found it to be a great read.

Carol is a young librarian fresh out of college in St. Paul, Minnesota, when she meets Dr. Will Kennicott. Kenicott courts her, and since Carol is bored with her life in St. Paul and has idealistic visions of reforming his hometown, she agrees to marry him. Upon arriving in Kenicott's hometownof Gopher Prairie for the first time, the new Mrs. Dr. Kenicott is horrified. She finds the town to be ugly and crude, and its inhabitants to be common and dull.
Carol sets out on several campaigns to revive the town: change its architecture, liven up their parties, start a dramatic club, among other things, but all are met with deliberate uncooperation on the part of the town.
The novel is a collection of events that serve to illustrate how different Carol is from Gopher Prairie. As the novel progresses, Gopher Prairie is painted as a self-satisfied and righteous dingy little town that shuns anyone who sees room for improvement in Gopher Prairie. Its inhabitants are primarily concerned with talking about crops and other people, and the more scandal, the better.
Carol leaves Gopher Prairie several times in an effort to escape Gopher Prairies expectations that she be a content housewife, even spending two years in Washinton, but she ultimately returns, accepting Gopher Prairie, but still determined to change it in small ways. The book ends on the somewhat melancholy note of Carol discussing her new outlook on reforming Gopher Prairie, while her native husband only half listens and thinks of the weather.

Coming from a small town myself, I foung Sinclair Lewis' portrayal of a small town to be right on. The town pride, the malicious gossips, the crop talk-- all are the perfect picture of true small town life. Lewis' satire is however, double edged, as Carol Kenicott is often portrayed as a judgemental city dweller who has no real understanding of the importance of non-city life. Carol is often sickeningly idealistic, sometimes to the point that she is just as irritating as the gossiping matriarchs of Gopher Prairie.
In places, the novel does get bogged down under the weight of just a little too much narrative, a few too many extra stories. As a whole, the novel was an enjoyable picture of one woman's struggle against the norm, done in wonderful descriptive style.

Rating:
Summary: A Story of Midwestern America
Review: Main Street is a classic story demonstrating the fascinating mentality of Midwestern America. It is best personified in the great character study of the beleaguered Carol Kennicott, who left the big city and dreams of culture to exist in mediocrity and banality in the small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. The reader is taken along her tumultuous life in this small town with her husband and family. At times the book is slow and can seem depressing. As a student from the Northeast who moved to the Midwest for college, it genuinely helped me gain a greater understanding as to why people act as they do in the Midwest. While Lewis wrote this book in 1930, his lessons are still applicable today in understanding human social interaction.

Rating:
Summary: Main Street
Review: Main Street is a satirical novel in every sense of the word. Lewis attacks the narrow-minded, intolerant and rude citizens of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and compares them to every other small town in America. 90% of the book discusses this topic while the other 10% speaks of the methods the main character uses to try and change the town into something it is not. Though there is a touching point at the end of the book where he praises the simplicity of small town life, by then you are so depressed by the dull town, the gossiping townspeople, and the straying main character that it loses its meaning.

Rating:
Summary: Excruciatingly dull novel that has notabel literary merit
Review: MAIN STREET is considered Lewis's Song of Songs, or his masterpiece. Being a writer, if this was my ultimate achievement, I would be thoroughly depressed and forsake writing and take up something more worthwhile to humanity, and not torture college and highschool students with this book (because those will be the only ones reading this -- them, or some other student of literature that feels like wading and enduring through this haliaetus novel). However, when it was first published in 1920 it sold over 500,000 copies. That was very significant back in those days. Lewis won the Nobel Prize in 1930. His acceptance speech, now called "The Fear of American Literature", is considered one of the most important essays on the topic. It dealt with other writers who should have been given this award, most notably William Faulkner.

The main problem with this novel is it encapsulates everything wrong with a small town, but by doing so makes itself very dull. The main conflict is Carol Kennicott trying to bring culture to an otherwise boring town. Because of that, Lewis spends some 400 pages (depending on your edition of course) detailing this conflict. The book is dull beyond comparison. At about page 250 to 300 you're wishing it was over. It just drags on and on and on and on. Everything that is wrong with the small towns (in the book) is wrong with this novel. That does not happen very often where what the theme is saying "correct this about society" the reading public is saying "correct this about this novel". Lewis is a literary anomaly, and his success rides largely on what era he is from - people read a lot more back then, and if this was published now, although of high literary merit this would not be successful at all.

It would have made a great short novel. It would be far more tolerable, and probably much more read. I respect what it did, showing what is wrong with small towns (although it is not a balanced portrait - the towns are not as horrible, and there is some redemptive qualities. But Lewis does pretty much hit everything on the head).

The style Lewis employed reads rather stodgy. There have been critical attacks on his style, while respecting his work. People say (this is the only work I have read by him) that all of his stuff is like this, as far as attacking different areas. MAIN STREET is directed to the small towns, ARROWSMITH to the profession of Medicine, ELMER GANTRY about the superficiality of some preachers and how they can be robbers as well as men of God, and then there's BABBITT, which is about the small time business man who has no moral scruples. DODSWORTH is also listed as a major work, though I don't know that one. BABBITT influenced Tolkien on his children's masterpiece THE HOBBIT and I've been meaning to read it for years, but I won't be able to wade through another Sinclair Lewis novel for quite sometime (BABBITT and MARVELOUS LAND OF THE SNERDS [SNERDS some type of fantasy book] are both 'source books' for THE HOBBIT, which makes them notable) . After finishing this, I daren't look at another Sinclair Lewis novel for at least a few years. I can barely stand to pick my own copy up of MAIN STREET and look at it, because I had to read it in a shortly compressed time and I was so ready for it to end. Someone said in a previous review Lewis cut 20,000 words from it - he should of cut half the novel and slim it down to maybe 150 or 200. It would also make an excellent story. Lewis researched his stuff meticulously, and he does deserve merit for his realistic portrayal of his chosen subjects. It is right on about the problems of a small town.

Notable scenes:

The train ride up to Gopher Prairie. Very nice descriptions and fully realised scene. My personal favorite.

Belle (a Swede) and Carol look at Main Street for the first time. We get both their contrasting perspectives. Belle comes from an even small town thinks its great, Carol hates it.

Washington, when she leaves.

Unfortunately, the first two occur at the first, this at the last. Very dull and boring. Would like to see this theme used for a short story or a novel (it would make a great short story or novella). About the most interesting thing in between all of that is Miles Bjornstam and Belle, which is Carol's maid. Guy Pollack and Vida Sherwin are also are interesting. Raymie the artist is supposedly based from Lewis's own life. Dr. Kennicott is very well realized, and very patient with "Carrie", as he calls her (I prefer that over Carol - I don't like the name Carol, and do Carrie.). But these characters are not enough to redeem this from a pleasurable reading session. It is the one of the numerous obligations of the writer to entertain his/her readers (of course, it is the lowest purpose). But there must be entertainment value to the novel to get on past that and into the themes and what the writer is trying to say. Bestsellers are out of balance - all plot and entertainment with no real high theme they wish to make, and this is out of balance too with all high qualities and ideals and yet no entertainment value at all, with most people wanting to give up in the middle, which I certainly did (someone said they think Lewis is one of those writers if you read one of his books you've pretty much read all of his books, and they're all the same, which is probably true). Lewis seems to have forgotten that in this excruciatingly dull novel.

3 stars just for the sheer impact of the novel. Personal taste, 1 star, so give 2 stars, though probably deserves higher than that.

Rating:
Summary: Original and Dangerous Female
Review: Most books have a good little female as the main character, many authors aren't strong enough to go ahead and create an offending lead female. Gratefully, Sinclair Lewis went ahead and did that, causing a novel some hate because of the mean and narrowminded female, and some love for her being so naive.

Her neighbors shunned her for being so fashionable and modern, and their husbands bashfully talked about her bare ankles, which causes stirrs in those days. This book takes you back into time, where modesty was the policy, and if you didn't follow it, you need be prepared. For Sinclair Lewis lovers, and lovers of personal growth and knowledge, this book is a must read.