Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism ed. by James M. Hutchisson (review)

The System Requirements are reasonable. For Macintosh: a 68040 or greater processor (including Power Macintosh); System 7. 1 or greater; at least 8 MB available RAM; a 256-color monitor; and a 2x CD-ROM drive. Ifusing a PC: a 486 running at 66MHz; Windows 3. 1 or Windows 95; at least 8 MB available RAM; and a 2x CD-ROM drive. As it is Ibsen's genius which this educational tool ofsophisticated technology profoundly celebrates, you wonder what he would say had he the opportunity to indulge in such a kaleidoscopic resource ofthe impact ofhis drama. The answer is obvious: considering the socio-pedagogical interest ofA Doll House, Henrik Ibsen would surely applaud. Let us see many more such creatively and intellectually astute investigations ofliterary masterpieces! % James M. Hutchisson, ed. Sinctár Lewis: New Essays in Criticism. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Company, 1997. 257p. William T. Hamilton The Metropolitan State College of Denver A casual reader ofthis volume might well conclude that the most important book in die Lewis canon is not Babbittor Main Street, but Mark Schorer's Sinckir Lewis: An American Life, published ten years after its subject's death. Mark Schorer did not admire Lewis the writer nor like Lewis the man. One of the earliest (1961) of the new school of oversized literary biographies, Schorer's book seems to recall every hateful word Lewis ever spoke or wrote and to describe every disagreeable act. According to James M. Hutchisson and his fellow essayists , Schorer's training as a New Critic disqualified him to read Lewis' work competently , seeking in his novels a felicity of style and ingenuity of structure and missing altogether the cultural insights, particularly in matters of gender, that constitute his real claim to greatness. In other words, Schorer was guilty of two flaws that one would think unlikely to occur in the same critic: on the one hand a kind of rigid formalism that makes him blind to merits other than diose that characterize modernists like Hemingway or Stein, and an illegitimate interest in the artist's personal life on the other. Only in the last decade or so, the argument goes, has a new generation ofscholars appeared, equipped by theirstudyoffeminism, New Historicism, or the theoretical constructs of Mikhail Bakhtin to appreciate Lewis' significance in the development ofAmerican literature and culture. Without necessarily accepting this version ofliterary history (Schorer's book is slightly more judicious than it sounds, and Lewis' best work has continued to be read and well regarded since it first ap96 H- ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW + FALL 1999 peared), readers will find much in Hutchisson's collection to support the contention that post-modern approaches do indeed shed new light on die novels. Most of the thirteen essays that make up most of the book are written from such perspectives. Together, they make a strong case for Lewis' enduring value as an interpreter and critic ofAmerican culture. Clare Virginia Eby's piece on marriage in three of Lewis' novels, for example, suggests the seriousness with which he analyzes this most critical of institutions in its distinctively American forms. Similarly, in an essay entitled "Gopher Prairie or Prairie Style? Wright and Wharton Help Dodsworth Find His Way Home," James Williams shows that Lewis was as serious a student ofthe American landscape and the ways in which men and women might live and work in it as Edith Wharton or Frank Lloyd Wright. All three ofthem, Williams points out, grappled early on with the opportunities and difficulties the automobile and the suburb presented to Americans, especially members of the new urban middle class. In "Mark Schorer, Dialogic Discourse, and It Can't Happen Here," Robert L. McLaughlin uses Bakhtin to account for a phenomenon he thinks Schorer missed: Lewis' ability to mimic a variety of forms of discourse to show just how close to fascism some American leaders in the 1930s seemed prepared to get and at the same time "provide the vocabulary, narratives, and languages" widi which more democratic ideas ofAmerica might be expressed (36). Far from the incoherence Schorer found in the multiple voices ofa Lewis novel, McLaughlin detects a keen understanding of the moral and political implications of the...