Rating: 
Summary: A Great Study of Americana
Review: My first Sinclair Lewis book: I'm impressed. The character of Carol is just outstanding. She's a heroine with whom you're irritated just as often as you're admiring of her. A 3-D woman, what a treat! I like how her "idealism" and "culture" are at times embraced and just as often rejected, because I think she functions as a mirror for the reader. How often do you and I try to "change" those around us? How often do they truly need it? How often are we blind to what needs to be changed about us, even as we set out to "improve" everyone? It's partly a satire of the two characteristics of our pioneering American life: we have to conquer and remake everything over in our own image, and yet we resist those efforts coming from anyone or anywhere else. What group of people doesn't? It's less the small-town mentality as the mentality of people who have banded together and enjoy their life because of its homogeneity and safety. It's not only socioeconomic issues that keep minorities, the middle class, and the well-to-do in their own neighborhoods, it's the common bond between you and your neighbors: in you, I see myself. This book is just a great effort to make us see ourselves; whether or not we change seems to concern Lewis less than whether or not we're aware of our idiosyncrasies.
Rating: 
Summary: So small towns really are unprogressive?
Review: Ok, so small rural towns are unprogressive and full of gossiping narrow minded simpletons. So what else is new? I assume that if you're interested in reading about these boring people Main Street is good. I can only guess that when the book was written, small towns were considered a glamorous place to be and the book exposed otherwise - making the author a hated person by rural WASP's all over America.
Rating: 
Summary: Accurate; in fact a little too accurate.
Review: Sinclair Lewis pains a picture of small town life. Carol, the main character, leaves the city with her new husband to experience small-town life in the small town of Gopher Prarie. As she settles into the town, she discovers its residents are conservative, resistant to change or new culture, wary of outsiders and those who are different, and blind to their own hypocricies. The plot basically follows her struggle against the small-town way of thinking and living.Those who enjoy an exciting storyline might want to search elsewhere. The book, somewhat intentionally, has a slow pace and few exciting adventures. Furthermore, Lewis is perhaps a little one-sided in showing the negatives of small-town life without showing many advantages. Still, the book teaches a valuable lesson about the dangers of too much routine and consistency.
Rating: 
Summary: An accurate description of the Mainstreets of America
Review: Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street" deals honestly with the negative aspects of small town life. In the book, Carol Kennicott, a big city girl marries Dr. Kennicott, and they move to the small town of Gopher Prarie. Carol is an idealist, but her efforts to reform the town are met with ignorance. The citizens of Gopher Prarie are convinced that they lead a utopian life, and that poverty and ugliness does not exist in their town. Carol is subjected to gossip, greed, and dullness in her journey through Gopher Prarie. I think this book is an accurate description of many small towns, but it deals too negatively with small towns. I have visited many times Lewis's hometown of Sauk Centre, after which Gopher Prarie was modeled, and found none of the drab buildings and narrow minded people that Lewis described. Howver, this novel is a classic example of how our own ignorance prevents us from seeing our true surrondings. This book is a real eye opener.
Rating:
Summary: Beauty and modernity are in the eyes of the beholder
Review: The clash between big and metropolitan cities and small and provincial towns has always been an interesting theme for books and movies. One of the best and first works to deal with this battle is Sinclair Lewis's famous novel "Main Street". He had already a good reputation when the novel was published in 1920, and it became an instant bestseller, making of "Main Street" one of the biggest literary events up to that point.
Contrasting to most of his works, "Main Street" is a novel of dark and pessimistic tone, satirizing the life in small towns in the early 20 Century. And however it may sound a typical theme for contemporary readers, Lewis was a pioneer when it comes to the conformity, narrow-mindedness and the individualism that rule in such place. These critics are made through the eyes of the main character, Carol Kennicott.
She is a young woman from Minneapolis that marries a small-town doctor and settles to his hometown. Her dream is to transform a prairie village into a place of beauty and culture. At first, Gopher Prairie seems to be the perfect place to make her dream come true. Little did she know that her project would be restrained by the other citizens -- notably the social elite, which, by the way, lacks a cultural polish.
Carol's first action is to redecorate her husband's house and hold a little party to meet her new friends. The event couldn't be more disastrous. And from the beginning she can notice the narrow-mindedness and the hypocrisy of that people. But she is stubborn enough not to give up. Her next step is to join the women's social and study club, but in both of them her ideas are categorical ignored. At the same time, she has the right feeling of being watched.
Her attitude brings problems to her marriage, and her husband, Dr Kennicott accuses her of feeling superior and being snobbish. This argument will be a constant in the narrative as a counterpoint of Carol's idea of perfecting Gopher Prairie. The narrative unfolds in the conflict between Carol's wishes and the town people inability of opening their minds and changing.
Lewis brings an interesting contraposition when he presents Bea -- who ends up being Carol's maid. This girl finds Gopher Prairie a beautiful and modern place. Using such device, the author attests that the modernity and beauty are in the eyes of the beholder. For Carol, the village is provincial and people lack culture and refinement.
Thinking of the historical context of when the novel was published, we can realize that Carol's wishes and desire social reform and individual happiness reflects her particular era, when labor movements grew and women at last achieved the right to vote in 1920. But his prose is a double-edged sword. While he attacks small towns and their people, Lewis is also against the superficial intellectuals who look down on those people.
Rating:
Summary: a pinprick story of suburban or small town conformity
Review: This book is better than four stars but remains beneath because the story is at times uninteresting. But the story is important nonetheless and it has a lingering and lasting relevence to community life at whatever time one might be living. Here is the tale of a bright, ambitious young girl with a clear mind and higher, more 'artistic' thoughts and the grumblings of a society that doesn't have enough respect for its own diverse individuality to exert the energy to focus on anything other than getting by and not have bad rumors spread about them. We see that even this becomes impossible as others will always find something suspicious in the most ostentatious of decent veneers. Main Street is a story of hypocrisy and disillusion, a brutally realistic tale of other people's misguided envy and their sense of inadequecy infecting and influencing even the purest of hearts. It's pretty grim reading and the frequent tedium of the sometimes excessive visceral detail helps to impart a sense of the numbness and monotiny poor Carol must suffer with daily.
Rating:
Summary: better than expected
Review: This is America - a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves. The town is, in our tale, called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina Hills. -Author's Preface As all of us know, Sinclair Lewis was the great liberal critic of small town, bourgeois Middle America. His novels demonstrated the small-minded conformity of the conservative folk of the MidWest, content to wallow in smug self-righteous ignorance. This at least is the common understanding of Lewis. But I found this book to be somewhat more nuanced. The satire extends not just to the townfolk of Gopher Prairie, but to the city folk of Washington too. Thus, when Carol Kennicott decides to return home, I did not see it as necessarily a surrender. She notes several times that noone in Washington cares about her, the way the townspeople back in Minnesota did. This seems to me to be the fundamental dilemma that Lewis sets up: Main Street requires conformity to tradition and social standards in exchange for recognition, respect and love from one's neighbors, the City offers freedom and individuality precisely because there's noone there who cares about you or what you do. Instead of flatly condemning small town America, Lewis seems to have had a more limited goal in mind. When Carol is planning to return, a leader of the suffragettes tells her that she need not heroically assault Gopher Prairie and the attitudes she finds there: 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 doctrine I know! Dangerous it may be, but it is also pretty conservative, shockingly so for a Socialist. What is spelled out there is a program that would allow for gradual reform of egregious wrongs, without tossing out what is good. It is the exact opposite of what actually occurred over the next 70 years of New Deal hegemony. This excellent message is obscured somewhat because the section that takes place in the city is pretty brief, while the town life portion goes on interminably. But it does redeem the book, which I sort of expected to just be just a hysterical screed. It's too bad that there's not more focus on this aspect of the novel. It offers constructive criticism and gives the book some universal significance, rescuing it from just being a slice of a life at a limited time and place in our history. Grade: C
Rating:
Summary: When will it end?
Review: Upon purchasing Main Street, I was enticed by the summary on the back cover. It talked of a woman striving to be proactive in a small town. She, however, finds the town to be closed-minded and petty and therefore has to first overcome their prejudices in order to turn the town into what she thinks it should be. By that account, it seemed the book would be easy to relate to and plunge into. Sinclair Lewis, in his many and repetitious descriptions of the setting of Gopher Prairie as a hideous and shallow town that sees nothing wrong with monotony and lack of life, first feeds the knowledge to the reader that small towns aren't as pure and wonderful as is thought. Eventually, though, he ends up shoving the ugliness and awfulness down the reader's throat, consequently choking him or her with the monotony of his own words. To say the least, it is a tedious book. It is not the kind of book that you can't wait to read at the end of the day. Instead, it is the type of novel that you would expect to be assigned in a high school English class. There is no suspense in the plot to carry you from one page to the next with the anticipation of greatness. Your fingers must turn each heavily satirical page of this horrendously long book while your eyes find that this new page is the same as the last--flat, shallow characters living on flat, open land. In this lengthy book (that apparently already had 20,000 words cut out of it), the characters, no matter how good they were supposed to be, are too easily hated by the reader because of their stagnance. The people in this book don't change. Their daily routines remain the same--get up, get ready for the day, spy on anyone who dares to be different, and gossip all day long. Carol, the book's so called 'heroine', frequently thinks of escaping from the small town and leaving her husband. She mentions it so profusely that you simply want to scream, "Then go already and get it over with!" This sensation, of course, is dragged out until the end, making the question of whether she will go or not one of the only uncertainties pondered while you read it. The other questions you may think over include the one that asks how Lewis feels about small towns. Generally speaking, throughout the novel he ridicules Gopher Prairie and its populace for their lack of culture. However, he ultimately contradicts himself by making the city woman, Carol, seem just as shallow, closed-minded, and unlikable as they are. To sum it up, don't judge a book by its cover--not even the back cover.
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