Capsule Review-"MAIN STREET" by SINCLAIR LEWIS

This article originally appeared in December 2004 issue of The Atomic Tomorrow. I am reprinting it here for Kate Gabrielle of 'Silents and Talkies', who loves Sinclair Lewis. Enjoy!!

Set largely in small town America in the second decade of the twentieth century, "Main Street" is a bold and unvarnished appeal on behalf of non-subversive individuality and practical feminism. Viewing marriage as something of a lark, and men as beings to be conquered, Carol Kennecott leaves her urban life behind to settle in the wilds of Minnesota, with her new husband, a doctor.

Artistic but insensitive, she sets out with a near-missionary zeal to bring culture to the inhabitants of Gopher Prairie. Initially tolerant of her odd ways, and her proud otherness, they are confident that she will soon soften her sharp individuality and learn to blend in, while she is arrogantly blind to the small yet genuinely artistic efforts of her neighbors.

We follow Carol, and her kindly ponderous husband, through a shifting mosaic of defiance, submission, flight, and compromise. She is not a heroine as such but a richly flawed woman; not always likable, she is deeply human. She grows and matures in the ways real people do, by starts and fits, with a sometimes imperfect understanding of what it is she is striving for, and working against.

The society that author Sinclair Lewis rails against,as opposed to that of Ayn Rand,his ideological opposite in the fight for personal sovereignty, is markedly our own. His ideals of individuality and freedom are attainable, though conditionally and at great cost, in this world. In Rand's novels, the only characters capable of achieving severance from the expectations of the world-at-large are such intellectually and physically superior specimens as to defy categorization as human. They are god-like inhabitants of a sordid, corrupt version of America; denizens of a fantasy universe of extreme and unthinking conformity.

Carol eventually finds a limited but hopeful place in the context of her chosen milieu, within the workings of fast-changing, modern society, where even the flawed, the weak, and the impotent can find ways to assert their uniqueness. That this is ultimately not enough to satisfy the spirit of humanity is the deeper truth that is hidden behind this story of one woman's struggle to adapt and thrive in an environment, and amongst people, she doesn't understand.

PHOTO: SINCLAIR LEWIS