Great character study. I loved how Carol couldn't adjust to her circumstances until she took the time to gain some personal insight. I don't think it's satirical. I've lived in small towns and it's almost dead on, especially as respects the usual attitude of imports from the city. Netlibrary has an unabridged audiobook of Main Street that is very well narrated. It helps make sense of the language unique to the period and brings characters more to life. Sinclair Lewis makes beautiful metaphors so I hope to read more by him. ( )

"Buddenbrooks is a pretty damned good book. If he were a great writer it would be swell. When you think a book like that was published in 1902 and unknown in English until last year it makes you have even less respect, if you ever had any, for people getting stirred up over Main Street, Babbit and all the books your boy friend Menken [H.L. Mencken] has gotten excited about just because they happen to deal with the much abused Am. Scene."
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
Selected Letters, pg. 176

A bit heavy-handed, true, but still a beautiful dissection of small town American faults and foibles. To appreciate it today requires only the least bit of imagination to transfer the setting from town and rural to towncenter and suburban sprawl. In the end it was delightful. ( )

This book tells the story of a young woman who gets married and moves to her husband’s small home town. There she finds that her “liberal” ideas (including that domestic help should get fair wages and that poetry and literature are appropriate topics of conversation at a gathering rather than gossip and conjecture) make it hard for her to fit in. She also disappointed that the town doesn’t live up to the pastoral ideal she had in mind, so she sets about on a number of reforms, which inevitably fail. I cannot help but admire the mind of Sinclair Lewis – he clearly shows in this book that he is both perceptive and visionary. He took a good hard look at what was wrong and what was right in America at his time and held nothing to be a given – whether it was the virtue of the small town over the big city or the traditional roles of masculinity and femininity (particularly in terms of their obligations to home and work). Some of his comments look to a future that has now been achieved (suffrage and space travel, for example). However, I must admit that I was not in love with this novel. Despite the interesting themes explored, I had two major problems with this book. The first was the main character, Carol Kennicott. She was rather wishy-washy, which I suppose humanized her (hey, I can’t make up my mind half the time either), but it made her a character very hard to feel strongly about and want to root for, particularly because the reader doesn’t know what to be hoping Carol will obtain in the end. Secondly, large portions of the book seemed repetitive (Carol tries some type of reform and fails, Carol tries some type of reform and fails, Carol tries some type of reform and fails, and so on). I suppose in part this may have been to get the reader to feel a bit of the oppression that Carol feels living this mind-numbing existence, but I found it difficult to not get bored with this tactic. ( )

I first read this as a sophomore in high school. I said this about Sinclair Lewis: "I absolutely adore his writing". Really?? While this book has much to say about a lot of things, I had a hard time relating to Carol. I never could figure out what exactly it was that she wanted. The character I ended up liking the most was Kennicott - although he certainly had his obtuse moments. It is true that some of humanity's worst qualities hide behind piousness and financial security and reputation. But I think that is true no matter where you go. In the beginning of the novel Carol seems to be overly concerned with how things look - she dislikes Gopher Prairie because it's not planned and beautiful. I think in the end, since the only person you can really change is yourself, Carol misses the point. Lewis makes it when he states the only real reaction you can make to smallness is laughter. But Carol seems to always have to have a cause. In the end, I'm not sure she was any better than "Main Street". Interesting commentary going on in this story ( )