Cass Timberlane

Cass Timberlane is a Minnesotan judge, stolidly in love with a woman many years his junior. Their relationship forms the dramatic backbone of the book, which Lewis intersperses with sketches of husbands and wives in Grand Republic.

I think this is a great book, because at times you feel as if it's firmly rooted in the 1940s Middlewest, and at others you sense that close detail of character that makes a story universal. I say "think" because I didn't leave the book with an overpowering sense of authorial mastery. But then again it is a book about small towns, and perhaps overpowering mastery would be the wrong tone :)

A failed attempt by Sinclair Lewis to relive his early success of "Main Street" by revisiting the locale and character types of that novel, this time with the male protagonist a judge. A worthy effort, but Lewis' talents have eroded too much by now to carry it off.

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ This is by all odds the best book Sinclair Lewis has given us for many seasons. It is a warm human story, a story of people everyone knows, of a community anyone could live in. There is none of the deliberate out of scale characterization that makes one feel -- at times -- that he is mainly a satirist. It is a story of marriage, the focus on Judge Timberlane and the lovely, somewhat unstable young wife, Jinny, who alternately stimulated his passion, his worship, his jealousy. But it is too the story of a community, of various types of people, patterns of marriage -- a story of an average mid-western small city today

4/20/22

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