Sinclair Lewis as Reader and Critic by Martin Bucco

Abstract

B o o k R e v ie w s 2 1 7 In this short but ambitious book, Paes De Barros relies considerably, and conscientiously, upon other critics and theorists, most notably Rosi Braidotti, Julia Kristeva, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose treatment of nomad subjects and nomad space is foundational to her analysis. Michel DeCerteau and Marc Auge, who are not discussed, would also prove useful to Paes De Barros; finally, her interest in the deconstructive energies of “bad girls” on the road places her in the company of literary critic Krista Comer and historian Virginia Scharff. Paes De Barros’s readings of individual texts are not always as fresh, or surprising, as one might hope, yet her range of reference is impressive. The sheer accumulation of US women’s travel narratives offered here forces the reader to recognize that the beaten path of Manifest Destinarian exceptionalism is not, and never has been, the most interesting American road. Sinclair Lewis as Reader and Critic. By Martin Bucco. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004- 535 pages, $139.95. Reviewed by Sanford E. Marovitz K ent State University, O hio A stalwart of the Western Literature Association, Martin Bucco has spent many years studying the work of Sinclair Lewis, a Midwesterner from Sauk Center, Minnesota. Prior to Sinclair Lewis as Reader and Critic, he edited a collection of critical essays on Lewis (1986), and his Twayne study of Main Street appeared in 1993. His thorough reading of Lewis’s voluminous works, reflecting Lewis’s own erudition, is evident throughout Sincbir Lewis as Reader and Critic. The book has three sections as well as general and character indexes, end­ notes, and a selected bibliography. The twenty-five-page “biographical over­ view,” which rapidly presents hundreds of undeveloped facts chronologically, is as much a compilation as an expository introduction. Chapter 1, “Drummer for Readership,” examines different types of readers, reading materials, and categories such as libraries and film that support or distract from reading. The text under each subheading begins with a point about Lewis on reading, and the remainder illustrates it with brief references to his fiction and characters. Hundreds of mythic, historic, and literary figures from Homer to Norman Mailer are introduced and discussed in the second section, which describes where and how Lewis alludes to them in his fiction. Although the entries are chiefly illustrative, those on Lewis’s contemporaries, especially authors whom he knew personally, include informative comments on their association. Throughout his life, Lewis supported midwestem realists such as Hamlin Garland and Sherwood Anderson, but he lambasted realist W. D. Howells in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech for Howells’s allegedly prudish influence on American letters. In contrast, after selling over twenty-five story plots to Jack London early in the 1900s, Lewis continued to admire the prolific author of the Far North and the South Pacific as a fine storyteller and realist. Bucco observes 2 1 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 that, although Lewis avidly read detective fiction, he persistently “mock[ed] perpetuators of the Popular Western,” yet he himself wrote Mantrap (1926), a western potboiler (257). Chapter 6, “Instructor in Authorship,” opens the third section. Bucco portrays Lewis giving practical advice to aspiring authors while he “aggres­ sively promote[s] American commerce and American culture” (428). Chapter 7, “Reviewer of Reviewers,” exposes Lewis’s conflict with the Pulitzer Prize judges, his praise of H. L. Mencken and others, and his intensive, unjustifiable mockery of Bernard DeVoto. For his closing lines, Bucco aptly quotes Lewis (who ironically is echoing Howells) on the relation of his fictive characters to himself: “There is no Sinclair Lewis about whom the autobiographer can write outside of what appears in the novelist’s characters. Good or bad, ‘they have in them everything I have been able to get from life or give to life’” (457). Although Lewis’s self-assessment is revealing, it does not constitute the discerning conclusion warranted by so comprehensive a study. Instead, Bucco ultimately leaves his readers...