MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis - youth, community, hypocrisy, isolation

There were twelve members of the Montrose Great Books book club around the table at Houston-Freed Montrose Library last night, August 6, 2009 discussing MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis. Susan who was a bit nervous led the discussion. It turned out exactly as I thought. The book had so many great complex characters and also so many pages (it was 450 pages for the edition I bought) that we all very rapidly started discussing without much need for prompting from the moderator.

As a result, Susan's job of leading the discussion was almost too easy and left her wishing we had more time for her to ask all of the questions she had prepared. This is one of the difficulties that can arise when we discuss one of the longer Great Book classics. The two hours of our discussion isn't really adequate to do it total justice but I think we made a good try and I left feeling satisfied that we had covered most of the main themes.

Susan started by asking who in the group had grown up in a small town. Four raised their hands with someone else indicating they had lived for a short time in a small town and found it to be very much like the town depicted in MAIN STREET. One of the four reported later as we went around the circle as we always do at the end of the meeting that she liked growing up in the small town. Someone else commented that she guessed the person who liked growing up in a small town much have been in the inner group of the town. Someone else indicated that her family must have had some money. Lots of generalizations and stereotypes going on about small towns. Do they deserve the criticism? Most felt they did

Susan began by asking about the preface to the book and the response by everyone who answered indicated it was thought the preface referred to the smugness of the town which was called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. In the preface, the author uses the phrase "betray himself an alien cynic" and this seemed to be well received by one of the more vocal participants, with the comment that the book was overall very cynical. This same participant brought up the "cynical" adjective numerous times throughout the discussion and no one disagreed (that I heard).

Initially we focused on the main character, Carol Kennicott. The story begins with her attending college and following her to her first job in a library after graduation, and then with her disillusionment that she wasn't going to make her mark on the world as she had hoped. Then came her decision to marry Will Kennicott, a man older by fifteen or so years and also one who was from Gopher Prairie, a small town which appeared to be pretty from the photographs that Will showed Carol but which culturally was completely different from St Paul, Minnesota which is where Carol went to school and even more different from New England where Carol spent part of her childhood.

Our first comments focused on her isolation from family, her mother died when she was young and her father died while she was still in St Paul. Her character wasn't someone who had known much about how communities function. She didn't understand things like the fact that it takes a very long time to be accepted by a community in a small town. She had the advantage of being married to a popular doctor in the town (though there were other doctors) therefore most in the community were very polite to her, almost too polite. They were condescending in their thinking that she would eventually settle down and behave more like those in the Gopher Prairie community rather than what they perceived was behavior probably common to pretentious people from the big city of St. Paul.

One in the group described her as a "twit" but that same person clarified that even though she was a "twit", that didn't mean that her opinions about the population of Gopher Prairie were incorrect. Some of us defended Carol, the main character and reminded the rest of the group that she was young, about 22 at the beginning of her marriage. Also, the author spent a fair number of paragraphs showing Carol as honestly trying to fit in with thoughts such as "they're just trying to be nice" and "they aren't so bad", etc. But her critical, analytical side always returned with the opinion that the citizens of Gopher prairie had no taste, or intelligence or appreciation for art and beauty. This included her husband as well. Initially, the book focuses on the horror she feels when she first sees how ugly the buildings on Main Street actually are, nothing like what she remembered from the photographs her then fiancee showed her when she was still in St. Paul. We discussed her decision to marry and several thought she took the easy way out and as a consequence of her bad choice, she had to endure major suffering later. Why didn't she make a better choice? Lots of fodder for discussion on this point.

Though the author is not always kind to Carol's husband, Will, it is clear that he had had an unrealistic understanding of how she would fit in. We spent quite a bit of time talking about what is required to "fit in". An interesting description was posed by one of the attendees regarding "boxes". That small towns did not have very many "boxes" that a new comer could aspire to fit in. That the advantage of larger towns was that they had more "boxes" for their citizens to "try on" and thus provided better options for people who might have otherwise been lonely and isolated in a small town because there was no where for them to fit in. This precisely describes Carol and the predicament in which she found herself even regarding her relationship with her husband's relatives such as Aunt Bessie as well as with someone whom she thought was her friend, Mrs. Westlake who turned out to be a terrible gossip revealing everything Carol told her in private to anyone and everyone.

Susan asked about what part religion played in the story. We all felt it wasn't significant, that neither Carol nor Will attended church regularly. That one of the main references to religion applied to Mrs. Bogart, the vicious, hypocritical character who had a delinquent son but would not admit it and who always found someone else to blame for her own son's shortcomings. This was illustrated especially well in the event of the new young school teacher named Fern who was accused of getting Mrs. Bogart's son drunk and as a result was asked for her resignation in a way that would destroy her career. Carol tried her best to defend Fern. And this was somewhat of a turning point for Carol because she went to each school board member's house asking that they not see Fern as the guilty person. We all thought this was somewhat of a change for Carol, that her timidity reflected in her initial actions when she first arrived seemed to be reduced to some extent for the first time when she confronted townspeople on an issue that wasn't very popular.

We discussed whether Carol's behavior was "heroic" or not. Some of us were more forgiving than others, believing that her youth prevented her from standing up to the town regarding the issues concerning discrimination of and poor treatment of the Scandinavian immigrants. It was brought up how she didn't eat in the kitchen with her maid whom she liked very much, even when her husband wasn't home. In one scene, she was talking through the kitchen door to her maid, Bea and her maid's visitor, Miles while they were eating. It was described as very awkward and snobbish of Carol by the author. This behavior changed dramatically later when she became nurse to Bea who became wife to Miles, a talented, resourceful Scandinavian immigrant who was intellectually independent and very critical of the townspeople of Gopher Prairie and someone whom Carol found kinship with. It was commented that Miles might have been a character meant to represent the author's views.

Later in the book after Carol has appeared to reach the point where she can no longer tolerate Gopher Prairie and that includes her husband as well, she takes an extended trip to Washington D.C. with her child Hugh. She is lonely in Washington but there are definitely things she likes about the big city. One interesting note is how friendly she was to the Haydecks when she accidentally ran into them in Washington. She couldn't have been more delighted. Her delight causes the reader to wonder that maybe there were some good things about Gopher Prairie after all. And this led us to discuss the "community spirit" that can be nurturing in a small time and something you don't find in a larger one. Though there were definite cynics in our group who commented that the "community spirit" was only nurturing if you were in the "in group".

I won't spoil the ending with my report here but want to comment that there were several women in the group who were not happy with the ending.

There is much that I have not mentioned here that we discussed such as:

1. the satirical aspect of the novel
2. situations with other characters such as Vida, Eric, Guy Pollard and Sam Clark to name a few
3. the exploitation of the farmers by the parasitical town as described by the author
4. the dysfunctional marital relationship between Carol and Will
5. the point at which Carol seems to find herself and have a sane strategy for proceding with the rest of her life

One of my own conclusions about the novel came into my head after the discussion. This often happens because the discussions are always thought provoking and fodder enough for me to keep thinking about the book long after the discussion. What I thought of later was the phrase "it takes a village to raise a child". That children raised in small towns are actually raised by the whole town because everyone knows everyone else. This is not always a bad thing. I wonder if it isn't largely responsible for that "country boy" personality type (or "country girl") that we are all familiar with - someone who is very polite when those of us raised in big cities are more likely to rage in the same situation.

But on the negative side, as one participant mentioned, most of the school tragedies that have occurred with young students killing other students have occurred in small towns (according to what she had heard). It seems one might draw a conclusion that for those children who do not fit into "a box" provided by the small town as an option, they become misfits and if one follows this logic, ultimately because of their own inability to find another pathway to "a box" that might be more compatible with their eccentricities, they choose to be destructive instead.

Well, since I am more inclined to be eccentric (at least my husband tells me I am), I am grateful that I wasn't raised in a small town like Gopher Prairie though my home town wasn't as big as I would have liked it to be.

Looking forward to our next discussion of UBIK by Philip Dick. More details about our group or our readings available at http://www.houstonbookclubs.org/Montrose/.