Spectrum Phonics Gr K New

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Description: Spectrum Phonics Gr K New

Genre: Classic fiction; Physicians' spouses; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Literature: Classics; Women college graduates; Classics; Fiction / Classics; Fiction; City and town life; Married women;

Average Review: 5 stars

Review: Down On "Main Street": "Is it really my failure, or theirs?" Carol Kennicott asks herself this question nearly 250 pages into "Main Street," regarding her impossible relations with the residents of the town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. By this time, I was asking a similar question: "Is it really my failure, or Sinclair Lewis's?" "Main Street" seemed a good idea as it sat on my shelf. Touted as a satirical look at middle-class America, it was Lewis's first successful novel, ushering in a new era upon its publication in 1920, and breaking critical ground for the Golden Age of American Literature, of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. How could I go wrong picking it up? The book tells the interminable story of Mrs. Kennicott, who marries a country doctor while imagining herself an improving influence on his as-yet-unseen town of Gopher Prairie. Imagine her surprise when she is greeted not as a liberator but grist for the gossip mill, with her Big City ideas and lack of churchiness. Carol's alternating turns of resistance and acceptance are about the sum total of this plotless book. Lewis's descriptive powers are much in evidence, and you find yourself trapped in G.P. as much as Carol, his descriptions of noisy neighbors and smug dinner parties bearing the unmistakable imprint of someone who grew up in small-town Minnesota and knew of what he wrote. The problem, when you get past the period slang and the barbed commentary, is that the subjects of Lewis's satire are so miserable and nasty you can't understand why Carol thinks she can change them, except perhaps with the idea nature couldn't possibly create people as one-dimensional as those found here. I thought I'd never read a duller work about small-town Americana from the early 20th century than Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." My apologies, Thornton. "Main Street" is as down on the same locale that "Our Town" exults, only Lewis lays on derision with a dripping trowel. Wilder, by contrast, seems almost surgical in the delicacy with which he makes his points. Lewis makes sure that when he presents us with the atheistic radical Miles Bjornstam, he is not only a voice of reason and affability to Carol but ultimately run out of town for his beliefs on the heels of having suffered a great tragedy, just in case we didn't otherwise get how miserable a town Carol is stuck in. "And you want to reform people like that when dynamite is so cheap?" Carol fumes early on. There is one effective section in the book, when Carol first discovers how isolated she has become and feels the "moist, fleering eyes" of prying neighbors so powerfully she draws down her window shades. Passages with her husband, the stolid, straying, but not worthless Dr. Kennicott, present some desperately-needed ambiguity. But the book just keeps going, hammering home the same points, before winding down with an ending that feels more like a cop-out, in which the still-radical but more placid Carol settles for the status quo while imagining her sleeping infant daughter as "a bomb to blow up smugness." Polemics can produce great writing, but seldom great literature, and "Main Street" is a case in point. The Signet Classic edition from 1998 features an introduction by Thomas Mallon which was the most enjoyable part of the book, candidly pointing out the book's faults but arguing for its continued value, as it imagines Carol's experience being like that of a young Hillary Rodham first arriving in Little Rock. Suffice to say I had a lot more fun reading it than I did the rest of this book.