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ddeblieck_13's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
I don't really know how to rate this book. It's a satire and critique of small-town America, and I assumed that, however novel these ideas were 100 years ago, the critique would be stale today. While this is somewhat true of the first half of the book, the critique is still so spot-on, and Lewis's writing so funny, even the weaker first half of the book is still worthwhile and current.
The second-half of the book (except perhaps the last 30 pages) is superb. True, the ending is probably the weakest section of the book. But for 150-200 pages the plot is engrossing and the writing fantastic. I would rate that section as a 4.5 probably and the rest a 2.5 or so.
Many people have complained that Lewis merely denigrates rural America without offering up any practical, possible improvements. But I don't think that makes any real difference. We are all allowed to, and I think it's important to, criticize unjust or unfortunate aspects of our society even if we have no viable alternatives.
Anyway, here are some random quotes from the book that I liked:
"Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors."
"They tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not content to leave the dress and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes and Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness?"
The second-half of the book (except perhaps the last 30 pages) is superb. True, the ending is probably the weakest section of the book. But for 150-200 pages the plot is engrossing and the writing fantastic. I would rate that section as a 4.5 probably and the rest a 2.5 or so.
Many people have complained that Lewis merely denigrates rural America without offering up any practical, possible improvements. But I don't think that makes any real difference. We are all allowed to, and I think it's important to, criticize unjust or unfortunate aspects of our society even if we have no viable alternatives.
Anyway, here are some random quotes from the book that I liked:
"Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors."
"They tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not content to leave the dress and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes and Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness?"
anarcho_zymurgist's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
I was not prepared to find this so emotionally impactful.
readingoverbreathing's review against another edition
3.0
"The prairie was no longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting; and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness."
Perhaps it is my impression because it took me so long to read it, but it seemed to me that the story of the domestic frustrations of Carol Kennicott dragged on and on relentlessly for four hundred fifty pages, as Sinclair Lewis recycled the same storyline over and over: Carol has an idea to improve Gopher Prairie, Carol launches the idea, no one in town takes to it, Carol becomes frustrated, Kennicott teases her, Carol gets upset with Kennicott and pouts, Kennicott does something doctorly or takes Carol somewhere to please her, Carol forgives him and decides she loves married bliss, and then has another idea.
Lewis's social critique is sound; his ideologies and Carol's are far ahead of their time. But they're lost in the repetitiveness of the plot, the unnecessary habit of constantly calling the wide cast of secondary characters by their first and last names, and Carol's whiny naivety. This novel started well, and I think to a certain extent, ended well, but the slow, repetitive pace of the middle really knocked out a star for me.
I also must say I think this book ruined Minnesota for me, not that I had a specifically high regard for it before. But now it's definitely out, as is any town with "gopher" in the title, though I think that already subjectively goes without saying.
blearywitch's review against another edition
5.0
I picked this book up because my husband grew up in Minnesota and I thought a classic based out of there would be interesting and a first for me. What tipped the scale for this book also was the fact that Sinclair Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 for his five great novels written in the 1920s of which Main Street was one. Upon my encounter with this book I have come to believe that it should be recommended reading to someone who wishes to absorb and ruminate the American values after moving to any state in America, coupled with Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry for those who find themselves in the Great State of Texas. Apart from education, it also helped me pinpoint exactly why I will not be able to retire to the countryside. Whatever one may glean from this would be varied from one individual to the other but one thing I'd daresay we'd agree on is that this was a delicious classic to devour.
"But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as a drooping bride at the alacrity with which he took that freedom and escaped to the world of men's affairs."
"Is it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and everything? Is there never any contentment, never any rest?"
"Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike forgotten in the march of realities and days."
["Getting colder," she said. "Yup". That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy.]
"It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others."
On traditions of small American towns:
"It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-thought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.
A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting backward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world."
"The respectability of the Gopher Prairies... is reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their own word, to be "highbrow", is to be priggish and of dubious virtue. Large experiments in politics and co-operative distribution, ventures requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do originate in the West and Middlewest, but they are not of the towns, they are of the farmers."
Ohh, I'll always be a city girl:
"I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so - Vida and Will and Aunt Bessie - they tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness?"
About arguments:
"There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid'. We'll never understand each other, never; and it's madness for us to debate - to lie together in a hot bed in a creepy room - enemies, yoked."
"Think how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions."
"Yes. I've heard that plea. It's a good one. It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you must live up to it!"
To note down pg 403 Will's romantic speech
Pg 405 para 3&4 Carol's admission
Words I've never heard before: dolors, traducers, adumbrated, simoom
"But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as a drooping bride at the alacrity with which he took that freedom and escaped to the world of men's affairs."
"Is it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and everything? Is there never any contentment, never any rest?"
"Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike forgotten in the march of realities and days."
["Getting colder," she said. "Yup". That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy.]
"It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others."
On traditions of small American towns:
"It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-thought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.
A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting backward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world."
"The respectability of the Gopher Prairies... is reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their own word, to be "highbrow", is to be priggish and of dubious virtue. Large experiments in politics and co-operative distribution, ventures requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do originate in the West and Middlewest, but they are not of the towns, they are of the farmers."
Ohh, I'll always be a city girl:
"I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so - Vida and Will and Aunt Bessie - they tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness?"
About arguments:
"There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid'. We'll never understand each other, never; and it's madness for us to debate - to lie together in a hot bed in a creepy room - enemies, yoked."
"Think how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions."
"Yes. I've heard that plea. It's a good one. It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you must live up to it!"
To note down pg 403 Will's romantic speech
Pg 405 para 3&4 Carol's admission
Words I've never heard before: dolors, traducers, adumbrated, simoom
bwood95's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
metallicbranch's review against another edition
2.0
This book was a struggle to finish.
I took from it a very interesting history lesson. Once upon a time, it was apparently not known that small towns were often claustrophobic and closed-minded places that thrived on conformity and despised all deviance and new ideas. Apparently, there once existed, in place of this story, the myth that "broad landscapes make for broad minds". It's almost a beautiful myth, and one that the American I'm in touch with has completely abandoned-- the idea that, as one of the younger countries, we had a lot of opportunity to construct something wholly new here, and that the developing frontier towns of the West and Midwest were ideal places to do this.
Lewis' first major novel was designed to shatter that myth, to depict all of the evils that we (or at least I) now associate with small towns. We're led through the setting of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota by Carol Kennicot, herself a midwesterner from a town that now barely makes the map, but who has lived in Chicago and St. Paul. Carol marries a man from this small town, and is immediately appalled by how ugly, boring, and constraining it is. She then intermittently tries to rectify the situation, despairs, and then becomes caught up in ordinary life, begins to make a place for herself until some crisis occurs, and the entire cycle recommences.
The result is that Carol is one of the most frustrating protagonists since Robinson Crusoe. Although not dim, she couldn't be said to be over-whelmingly intelligent, and in fact, she is no iconoclast-- she is merely from a different kind of mold, the kind that creates and reifies "the canon". In Lewis' hands, she floats between satire and sincerity. Indeed, one of the things I found most frustrating about the book was that for the first 250 pages or so, I wasn't sure whose side I was supposed to be on. That Gopher Prairie doesn't want to build Colonial-style houses and read Browning didn't particularly bother me, and the idea of trying to enforce those tastes on the locals seems absurd. That the town condemns anyone-- especially any man-- who does share such tastes offended me very deeply. So I sat on the edge between being constantly annoyed with Carol, and completely in identification with her struggle.
It's worth adding in that this book is immensely long. I don't generally shrink from a book based on its page count, but I think this one stood out because of how repetitive it was, and for many parts, how stressful I found it. I finally found a tragic heroine toward the end in Fern Mullins; I finally found satisfaction when Carol left Gopher Prairie (if only for a short time). And I was relieved, finally, when the book was over and I could move on to something else.
I took from it a very interesting history lesson. Once upon a time, it was apparently not known that small towns were often claustrophobic and closed-minded places that thrived on conformity and despised all deviance and new ideas. Apparently, there once existed, in place of this story, the myth that "broad landscapes make for broad minds". It's almost a beautiful myth, and one that the American I'm in touch with has completely abandoned-- the idea that, as one of the younger countries, we had a lot of opportunity to construct something wholly new here, and that the developing frontier towns of the West and Midwest were ideal places to do this.
Lewis' first major novel was designed to shatter that myth, to depict all of the evils that we (or at least I) now associate with small towns. We're led through the setting of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota by Carol Kennicot, herself a midwesterner from a town that now barely makes the map, but who has lived in Chicago and St. Paul. Carol marries a man from this small town, and is immediately appalled by how ugly, boring, and constraining it is. She then intermittently tries to rectify the situation, despairs, and then becomes caught up in ordinary life, begins to make a place for herself until some crisis occurs, and the entire cycle recommences.
The result is that Carol is one of the most frustrating protagonists since Robinson Crusoe. Although not dim, she couldn't be said to be over-whelmingly intelligent, and in fact, she is no iconoclast-- she is merely from a different kind of mold, the kind that creates and reifies "the canon". In Lewis' hands, she floats between satire and sincerity. Indeed, one of the things I found most frustrating about the book was that for the first 250 pages or so, I wasn't sure whose side I was supposed to be on. That Gopher Prairie doesn't want to build Colonial-style houses and read Browning didn't particularly bother me, and the idea of trying to enforce those tastes on the locals seems absurd. That the town condemns anyone-- especially any man-- who does share such tastes offended me very deeply. So I sat on the edge between being constantly annoyed with Carol, and completely in identification with her struggle.
It's worth adding in that this book is immensely long. I don't generally shrink from a book based on its page count, but I think this one stood out because of how repetitive it was, and for many parts, how stressful I found it. I finally found a tragic heroine toward the end in Fern Mullins; I finally found satisfaction when Carol left Gopher Prairie (if only for a short time). And I was relieved, finally, when the book was over and I could move on to something else.
annewithabook's review against another edition
3.0
This book, according the Wikipedia, is a satire, which amazes me, since Sinclair Lewis captures the reality of Minnesota people so well it seems he is less mocking and more observing reality. He captures perfectly the ideals, cruelties, and life of the people in Gopher Prairie and though I was not fond of any of the characters, I could not help but be entranced with the realistic hilarity of the scenes filling this book.
Full review on my blog: https://madamewriterblog.com/2019/05/13/book-review-main-street-by-sinclair-lewis/
Full review on my blog: https://madamewriterblog.com/2019/05/13/book-review-main-street-by-sinclair-lewis/
pharmacdon's review against another edition
4.0
Main Street is about an idealistic young woman, Carol, who is wanting to change a small town. These changes vary as the story unfolds. She moves the village with her new husband, who is a doctor.
Most of the men are Good Ol' Boys that are conservative in their outlook.
The husband was one of them: "To him, motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles and piston-rings possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels."
The wives are generally gossips and are conservative as their husbands. Carol meets roadblock after roadblock on her ideas. She is attracted to the few men that aren't accepted in the good old boys club. She daydreams about running away with one of them but realizes that it wouldn't last.
After several ups and downs, she realizes that mostly she can like the people while still not agreeing with them.
The story is an interesting read, and even though the story starts before World War I, it reads like a modern story.
Most of the men are Good Ol' Boys that are conservative in their outlook.
The husband was one of them: "To him, motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles and piston-rings possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels."
The wives are generally gossips and are conservative as their husbands. Carol meets roadblock after roadblock on her ideas. She is attracted to the few men that aren't accepted in the good old boys club. She daydreams about running away with one of them but realizes that it wouldn't last.
After several ups and downs, she realizes that mostly she can like the people while still not agreeing with them.
The story is an interesting read, and even though the story starts before World War I, it reads like a modern story.
daniellesshelves12's review against another edition
3.0
Really, it was okay. I had a great respect for the main character until the end. I don't believe you should change your dreams or plans for anyone. She ended up changing herself to be with Kennicott after he has an affair and wants her to change the way she thinks....I didn't like that.
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