This is an odd 1947 novel written by Sinclair Lewis. He died a few years later and this is one of his last novels. At it’s heart, it’s a social novel that has a “point” but in addition to exploring the conceit of the novel it meanders a lot. I don’t usually say this, but this novel should be about half as long as it is. The plot involves an American family of Scottish ancestry living a smallish, but establish town in the Midwest. The […]

So the plug for this book on a recent edition says “The book that foreshadowed Trump’s appeal” or some nonsense like that. A novel can’t foreshadow reality, but it can prefigure it. Sinclair Lewis knows Americans really well, and while there’s a lot here that will look like mind-reading, is really just good observation. Like Stephen King, like plenty of other, Lewis knows what makes Americans work, and this book, unfortunately feels prescient right now. The book itself describes the rise of a particular American […]

In 1936, Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrop, a dreadful demagogue, is elected President of the United States. In short order, he turns the country into a fascist dictatorship in which every form of dissent or criticism is crushed immediately. In a small town in Vermont, newspaper editor Doremus Jessup opposes the new regime. A biting satire and a cautionary tale of the rise of fascism, this is eerily prescient and a sharp reminder that democracy is fragile and has to be actively protected, and that no country […]

There’s a good story in here somewhere. The premise is intriguing. What would’ve happened had a populist presidential candidate, who campaigned on the promise that he would give the lower classes exactly what they wanted, had won the 1936 presidential election? The result is a watered-down version of Nazi Germany in Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here. This book has seen a boon in sales recently, seeing as how we have elected a populist president who’s given the lower-classes (i.e. blue-collar Whites) what they wanted. […]