I read this book over the last few days on Instapaper, on my phone, between essays, and alternating with a few other NF books. However, towards the last quarter of the novel, it was read devotedly to the exclusion of everything else. Guess I was quite drawn in the lives of Carol Milford and the Doc.
This is not the first Sinclair Lewis I've read. I read Babbitt a few years ago; six years may be. At that time, I compared Babbitt to Gatsby. since I read them together. Same times, but very different lives. On that one, more here.
Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street a couple of years before Babbitt. Both are about the North America of a century ago. Almost exactly a century ago. Both are satirical, sort of.
I think Main Street mirrors Babbitt in many ways. A sort of alt-mirror of themes. Where Babbitt was about a man living in a big town/small city/ Chicago/ Zenith (?) seeking answers to the existential questions raised by middle-class life, Main Street is about a woman, living in a small town, seeking answers to existential questions raised by the limits of life in a small town. Big aspirations trapped in feeble wills or the ever-thickening chains of everyday lives. Both try a sort of escape, in their respective books, they both get away from the status quo, look for answers, and eventually, both come back to live their lives as they were. Nothing really changes, not sure what answers they get, but then when are journeys ever about external conquest? They are all journeys inwards, the conquest of that unruly self that keeps questioning, unsatisfied, seeking, not finding. Call it the eternal quest, the eternal seek. Which we all in our own ways grapple with.
Taken together, one may conclude from these books is that male or female, working or managing house, in a small town or a big city, happiness or satisfaction is elusive if it is not inside you. The seeking of the better, the hope to find meaning needs to be quenched perhaps by accepting that there is no meaning to be found. It is what it is.
I enjoyed reading Main Street. The life and times captured beautifully. The portrayal is quite detailed. Apart from the main theme of Carol and her pursuits, there are many other small details, incidents throughout the book that make the portrayal rich and brings the characters closer to you. Having grown up in a small town myself, I can sort of identify with what the author says about life in a small town.
The other thing I realise is that I have grown up since I read Babbitt. (What is this about growing older, second time I note this week. Guess will need to take the plunge with hair coloring!)
I have grown in terms of the range of books I could read in between. And then, grown personally a little bit over these years, reflecting more, and hopefully getting wiser and humbler, and perhaps more accepting of people and things. A better way to put it is I have become more peaceful and less restless, and more patient with books and authors and even with points that I might not agree with.
The one other book that I recently read that may be compared to Main Street is Portrait of a Lady. (more here). Another American, but with a very international bent of mind. Portraying a period of around four decades ago (1870s and 1880s) from Main Street, Isabel Archer is not really Carol Milford. But lives were not very different for women then. They were yet to get the freedom to work while as wives, and were yet to get voting rights, and housework was as complicated as in 1880s. In fact, Isabel Archer gets a slightly wider scope in life, because a) she has money or as they said in that time, fortune (which ironically becomes the dooming point, and the novel is the sort of tracing of the path fortune sends her on rather than what she chooses) and b) she is travelling and experiencing lives and cultures which poor Carol dreams of while living her curtailed life in Gopher Prairie.
Both are portrayals of women in two different, disparate lives. And for some reason, now I feel, both treat their heroines with a bit of irony, and a bit of inferior brush strokes. Very different from say what George Eliot would do with Dorothea (Middlemarch) or Maggie (Mill on the Floss) or Austen with Elizabeth Bennett (Pride and Prejudice). Somehow, there is more respect and equity in the way women portray women, more compassion too. My prejudice at the moment, may be. Sprung right after comparing Carol with Isabel, and then remembering the other few heroines I have encountered.