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Sinclair's Search
| Article
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21925 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1993 |
2,686 Words |
| Author
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James Thompson
James Thompson, who lives in Nashville, is the author of
several books, the most recent of which is The Church, the
South and the Future. |
MAIN STREET AND BABBITT
Sinclair Lewis
New York: The Library of America, 1992
898 pp, $35.00
The 1920s belonged to Sinclair Lewis. From the publication of Main Street in 1920 to the winning of the Nobel Prize ten years later, he piled success upon success. Impatient idealists and disgruntled intellectuals especially acclaimed Lewis for his scathing and risible attacks on complacency, mediocrity, hypocrisy, and phoniness. In Main Street he aimed his withering satire at small towns, castigating them for the bigotry, provincialism, and ignorance they fostered. Life in Gopher Prairie--Lewis' Anywhere, USA--"is dullness made God," Carol Kennicott groans. In Babbitt, published in 1922, Lewis sardonically eyes the bustling midwestern city of Zenith, home to George F. Babbitt-booster, joiner, and go-getter extraordinaire. Lewis exposed the sterility of the "business civilization" that Babbitts from Main street to Wall Street were noisily celebrating as America's muscular rebuke to an enfeebled and despairing Europe.
Taking a page from Flaubert, Lewis could have declared: "Carol Kennicott, c'est moi, for the protagonist of Main Street voices Lewis' anger toward his own hometown of Sauk Center, Minnesota, from which he had fled two decades earlier. "He was a queer boy, always an outsider, lonely," Mark Schorer observes at the beginning of his biography of Lewis Village life, barren of the Arnoldian sweetness and light the young Lewis dreamt of, inflicted wounds that never healed. Through Carol Kennicott, he avenged the thwarted yearnings of his boyhood.
Although Lewis relished Carol's denunciation of Gopher Prairie, he unwittingly revealed his heroine's ineffectualness. Carol Kennicott's problem is not Gopher Prairie, but Carol herself, her inability to exist comfortably within her own skin. Eager to focus her innumerable discontents, she embraces feminism. Once wakened to injustice, she expands her sympathies to all the oppressed, to "the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies." But she fails to corral her sprawling dissatisfactions into a consistent ideology or plan of action. She skitters from complaint to complaint, from cause to cause--sticking to none for long, unable to finish what she begins. Her friend Vida Sherwin Scolds: "You're an impossibilist…You want perfection all at once."
Carol's feminism issues less from the sting of injustice
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