| Title | : | Free Air |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0803279434 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780803279438 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 370 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1919 |
In his introduction Robert E. Fleming discusses the place of this early novel in Lewis’s canon.
Free Air Reviews
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Free Air was such a pleasant surprise. In fact, it was a breath of fresh country air. As a reader, from the first page I felt like I too was driving a vintage car — one from 1919, when the novel was set, and tackling the winding and rough roads on the way to Seattle. The story focuses on the female protagonist, Claire Boltwood, a socialite from Brooklyn, who is tired of New York’s elite, and all the tea parties and luxuries begin to suffocate her, hence she hits the road. Together with her father, a well-to-do business man, she begins her adventure behind the wheel. From the onset, the reader senses what a rebellious thing this is for a woman to be doing in that particular era. We also see that her father knows nothing about driving a car, and being outside his comfort zone, lets his daughter take the reins.
I could practically feel the winding streets as they drove. They ate eggs by the campfire, coffee that wasn’t too good, and felt awkward as they met people from different towns who weren’t used to seeing elite New Yorkers. It was quite an adventure as a reader, as I didn’t know what interesting characters they would meet next. One such character is the leading man, Milt Daggett, a car mechanic who lives in a remote town and owns a car repair business, and is respected in the town because most people, apart from the professor and his wife, don’t aspire for much in life — they have no dreams of their own. Running into Claire rekindles a hidden desire — and he realises that he is different to others in the sleepy town where he resides. Milt does have dreams to evolve — to better himself as a person. On a whim, he too heads for Seattle after helping the Boltwoods get out of many sticky situations during their driving adventure.
After many unexpected meetings between the Boltwoods and Milt Daggett, the story completely changes direction — it no longer focuses on the open road. This took me completely by surprise, and I began to appreciate the novel even more. I was highly impressed with the author’s deep insight into complex human emotions. He masterfully tapped into human desperation, human vulnerabilities and inner desire — yearning for something more in life. I could feel Claire’s desire to integrate various aspects of her personality. We see her come alive amongst the free air, roughing it behind the wheel, eating mediocre meals, and sleeping in places that were a vast contrast to the luxurious, pampered life-style she was accustomed to. Milt yearns to become educated and to be able to exchange intelligent conversation with Claire and her circle of friends. Thus, the journey on the road becomes a personal one for the main characters; for each to get in touch with their true self — to move forward and explore different directions within their life, and within themselves as individuals. This was definitely not “just a love story”. There is great substance and depth in this novel. There is also clever wit and intelligent insight into the nature of people. I could feel the needs of the characters and their confusion when it came to following their dreams — the uncertainty regarding how they will attain their goals, or rather, if they can attain them.
It was also interesting to get a glimpse of how people at the time would have felt about driving a car. Not many people owned one and the reader can feel the excitement and thrill when they drove. It was also interesting to see that there were many stereotypes and prejudices regarding certain minorities but that simply reflects how things were back then, and the characters reflect society of the time — how they saw different people that had migrated from other countries, and how the upper and lower classes regarded each other. Similarly, the expectations that society placed on females is also evident.
Overall, I enjoyed reading this novel immensely. The author had a gift for seeing different complexities within humans, and I feel that this novel is a love story with a “finding yourself” theme. A well-written romance, for me, cannot separate the two, as a true love story deals with deep, human, complex emotions and brings other elements into it, such as the expectations of others and the struggle the characters are faced with to hold onto their instincts and not be swayed. It may seem light-hearted, but if you look deeper into the underlying messages, it becomes clearer that the novel has genuine feeling seeping through the pages. I am actually sad to say goodbye to the characters and to the era the novel was set in. This was a wonderful ride but even drives on the open road have to end, even if we want them to go on indefinitely, as we may run the risk that we may stop and settle to a life that is more ordinary than extraordinary. -
I picked up the audiobook version of Free Air on a whim when I saw it on sale. I’ve read a couple of Lewis’s novels and I want to read more, but I’d never heard of this one. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the story. It’s a great adventure and a charming love story, but it also offers numerous insights into American society and human nature.
The novel describes a road trip in which young Claire Boltwood, accompanied by her father, drives her roadster from Minneapolis to Seattle. Claire is a socialite from Brooklyn Heights, New York, who spends her time in “gracious leisure” and “attractive uselessness.” She suffers the attentions of boring boys from Princeton and Yale, along with one somewhat older man, Jeff Sexton. Jeff is “solid” and “nice.” “And he was so everlastingly, firmly, quietly, politely, immovably always there.”
Claire’s widowed father, Henry, is a successful businessman, but he’s a workaholic and suffers from nervous exhaustion. Claire has lured him to Minneapolis, where his firm has a branch office, in the hope that he will spend some time relaxing. But he works just as hard in Minneapolis as he did in New York. So Claire proposes a long road trip to Seattle to visit relatives. Claire will drive—her father is used to chauffeurs and doesn’t drive.
Soon after they start out from Minneapolis, the roadster gets stuck in the mud. Fortunately, a Good Samaritan, Milt Daggett, intervenes. Milt is a young mechanic from the nearby town of Schoenstrom, Minnesota. Milt is as homespun as Claire is sophisticated. But from the minute he first laid eyes on Claire when she stopped in Schoenstrom a few miles back, he was smitten with her. On the spur of the moment, he decided to hit the road himself in the wild hope that he might get to know her. When Milt sees Claire’s roadster stuck in the mud, he seizes the moment. And Claire is impressed by his quiet and friendly competence.
From then on, Claire and Milt continue to have encounters along the road—since Milt knows that Claire is headed to Seattle, he tells her that’s where he’s going too—and gradually, they do get to know each other. They both realize that they’re very different people from very different worlds. As the miles go by, they educate each other and the differences recede in importance, but will the differences ever recede enough that Claire and Milt can move on from casual road-trip-inspired friendship?
Sinclair Lewis was an astute observer of American life. In Free Air, he makes pointed, progressive observations about gender roles and class and regional prejudices. (On the other hand, he does seem to accept some conventional views on issues like ethnic and racial discrimination.)
By the standards of the day (the novel is set in 1917), Claire is a feminist, but she’s been trapped in the role that society has assigned to her. She sees the road trip as a chance for independence. “Free Air” is Claire’s motto for the trip, which she takes from an advertising sign on the air hose at a garage. At one point, when Milt makes a mostly-joking comment about “kidnapping” Claire to toughen her up, Claire calls it an “insane masculine conceit, which I, as a woman, resent. Shakespeare may have started it, with his silly Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare's men may have been real, but his women were dolls, designed to please some majesty. You may not know it, but there are women today who don't live just to please majesties' fancies.” As much as she likes Milt, Claire is no pushover.
Lewis’s sharpest social commentary concerns class and regional distinctions: the elites of the east and west coasts versus the folks of mid-America. It’s not long into the trip before Claire thinks that the Eastern sophisticates who denigrate rural folk as “peasants” or “hicks” don’t know what they’re talking about. “In fact, Claire learned that there may be an almost tolerable state of existence without gardenias or the news about the latest Parisian imagists.” Not that it would be easy for Claire to forswear the luxury of the comfortable, well-off society into which she was born. But in Milt, she sees another option. And Milt, for his part, sees Claire as representing a wider world—a world of education, achievement, the arts, and more—than his background provided.
As a result of her road trip, Claire has one foot in each of the two worlds. The men from those two worlds who love her, Milt Daggett of the Midwest and Jeff Saxton of the East, both claim to know the “real” Claire. According to Milt: “‘You've never seen her bucking a dangerous hill—I kind of feel that a person who hasn't seen her in the wilds doesn't know her.’” But Jeff disagrees: “‘I don't want to be contradictory, old man, but I feel on the other hand that no one who has failed to see her at the Junior League Dances, in a Poiret frock, can know her!’” The question is, does Claire know the real Claire?
I really admire Lewis’s writing. He describes the landscape, the people, and the events in the book with equal mastery. Even though the book was published a hundred years ago, it seems fresh and lively. And I especially enjoy Lewis’s dry wit that infuses many of his descriptions, especially his descriptions of the foibles and pretensions of people: “Georgie had a little mustache and an income, just enough income to support the little mustache….”
I recommend this book highly: 4-plus stars. (I didn’t love the narration of the audiobook, especially the male narrator’s attempt to give voice to Claire. But I’m not much of an audiobook fan anyway, and in fact, I listened to most of it with a written copy of the text in front of me, so take my view of the narration with a grain of salt.) -
Written in 1919, this is the story of Claire Boltwood - NY socialite on a road trip with her wealthy businessman father from Minnesota to Seattle. They get a true taste of the wide open spaces as they motor their car through the small towns of the plains and mountains of the west. Perhaps their biggest realization is the beauty of Americans that wouldn't fit neatly in their social circles. Along the way, Claire picks up an admirer in small-town mechanic Milt Dagwood. While he adores her, can she overcome her own prejudices to see him for who he really is?
I found this a charming story. I have not read any of Lewis's more famous works. I would say that his style is typical of his era, reminiscent of Fitzgerald, but with more small town charm in it. It reminds me of Pride and Prejudice meets The Great Gatsby....Claire is a woman with an identity crisis. She has known nothing but social circles, but real life effects her in an unexpected way. I enjoy the time period, the adventure of learning about America in the grand adventure of the road trip. There is lots of vasilating in this story for both Claire and Milt.
Recommend for people who love the classics, or American History. Take a peek into the troubles of the early 20th century. -
I think it was Raymond Chandler who said that when he was writing a story and the plot began to drag, he would have a man come through the door with a gun. Sinclair Lewis did something very similar at the end of each segment of his 1917 serial Free Air by inserting an abrupt meeting between one of his two protagonists and the person he or she least wants to see. The first 150 pages or so of the novel version, published two years later, are so clever and charming that it's a real letdown when these seams begin to show.
Lewis was a master of place-setting, and his descriptions of the back roads between Chicago and Seattle are often first-rate. It's interesting to read a portrait of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota written three years before he used that fictionalized Sauk City as the setting for his best-seller Main Street. In the early sections, Free Air's Claire Boltwood, whose opinions about provincial towns and townspeople have been shaped by a privileged Brooklyn girlhood, seems like a first draft of the later book's Carol Kennicott. Of the two, Claire is the physically and mentally stronger: she's capable of wrestling a heavy touring car along mountain roads for days at a time, and she's far quicker on the uptake than the dense Carol about the humanity and decency of most people, whether or not they've been formally educated. Hero Milt Daggett resembles other later Lewis creations, most strongly the self-made success Sam Dodsworth. He's an appealing fellow, alternately self-conscious and assertive and always yearning to improve himself.
The novel is far from perfect. Whether deliberately or not, Lewis gives both his main characters the same irritating on-and-off tendency to speak in telegraphese. ("Had nice trip; that's all I wanted. Never did intend to go clear to Seattle, anyway. Go on to Butte, then back home.") Secondary characters drop in and out of the narrative with no explanation, and the fate of a non-human who had added real color to the early chapters seems contrived, as if inserted in haste to meet a deadline. Free Air should have been edited down by a third between its magazine and book appearances. If the second half had lived up to the promise of the first, I would award it four stars. However, it's neither truly good enough for that rating nor ordinary enough to deserve a straight three, so my final judgment is three and a quarter. -
It's fascinating to read novels written in their time especially when literary commentary is included. These works are now 'historical' novels, no affectation, no interpretation, just clean recording of what was happening then and what society's response was, meaning Lewis's.
In this novel, published in 1919, the automobile was just appearing on the scene and of course, all hell was breaking loose. Freedom realized. Change, permanent, including women's 'rights' in that the protagonist of this story, progeny of the Gilded Age, Claire Boltwood, does something absolutely audacious for the time: drives cross country with her father. Not only was driving across America 'quite daring' then because there were no paved roads, she does all the driving. The cars, as basic as they get. There is a lot of fishtailing through thick mud, getting stuck, blowing tubes, throttles, axles, you name it. Mechanics? All you can do is walk until you find one, maybe 20 or more miles unless you 'run into' one which is where this tale begins. They cat and mouse one another all the way to Seattle, Milt Daggett, a 'common boy' from Minnesota and Claire who is not quite sure she should lower herself to like him but she does, then she doesn't, then she does...then he doesn't...
A story so layered, you can read it more than once and get something different from it each time--Claire's elite elderly father facing incredible change that he finds rather appalling not the least of which is his daughter driving them cross country but he is too elderly to take the wheel plus cars are from outer space to him. Claire as a woman taking this on? Is this something a woman should be doing? The class tension between Claire and Milt, a main theme of the story. The hardship of driving before any interstate road system existed. The implications of the common man/woman obtaining a car. How would this affect society? Should a common person be allowed to have one?
A few of Lewis's novels were made into movies during the Silent Movie era. It would be wonderful to see modern depictions of any of his novels including this one. PBS Masterpiece? BBC? Please?
Like all of Lewis's novels, this 'historical novel' offers invaluable perspective to where society is now but isn't this the very definition of the classics and why we love them? -
I really enjoy reading Sinclair Lewis. His books are written for a contemporaneous audience so he uses the commonly used slang for the period and expects his reader to understand his references because they were commonly used at the time. To me this is much better than historical fiction and puts me right in the middle of the story. "Free Air" is about a young woman, who comes from wealth, driving from New York to Seattle and a young man of modest means that she meets along the way. It's basically a love story that exposes the clash between cultures that ensues. What I particularly enjoyed about the book, though, was the description of the drive and conditions of what passed as roads in the early 1900's. Driving back then meant traveling on mostly dirt and mud roads in cars that frequently broke down and on tires that consistently punctured and since the book was written for an audience of the period it was described in a matter of factual way. A great read that I thoroughly enjoyed.
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Oh, what a great story. A love story. I am in love with Sinclair Lewis.
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A mildly amusing drive West, escaping the stuck up East Coast, discovering freedom and equality.
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Road trip!!
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If you have never heard of Sinclair Lewis before, you can think of him as F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s counterpart. He also published during the ‘roaring twenties,’ but wrote of many different classes of people. It seems he especially liked yoking together characters from high society and low society, to see how they get along. This yoking together is exactly what he does in Free Air (April 1922), the seventh of twenty-six novels he has written.
Similar to what we envision of the 1920′s, Lewis’ prose comes across as high and fast. The high part revealing the lofty and romantic language he uses throughout the novel (taken from the upper class); the fast part is revealed in long run-on sentences that the characters speak and seems to work particularly well in this time period.
Before I continue with my review of Free Air, I want to note that in 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature and as a prize recipient, was required to write a short autobiography on his career so far. I strongly recommend anyone considering being an author (or currently in the struggles of becoming one) take a peak (you will also notice his ‘high and fast’ language here:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prize...). My favorite quote from this autobiography comes at the very end where he reveals his ever-present satire: “I am settled down to what I hope to be the beginning of a novelist’s career. I hope the awkward apprenticeship with all its errors is nearly done.” Only after writing 14 novels and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, does he finally allow himself to truely ‘begin’ his career as a novelist.
Free Air can be summed up as a book about the great American road trip. Claire Boltwood and takes her father Mr. Boltwood on a cross country car trip from New York city all the way to Seattle, WA. Although Claire describes their financial situation to be mediocre, I found out that they really are a part of the elite New York society that was akin to British royalty in the 1920′s. The road trip is full of humor and character building crisis’ for Claire (the modern reader will find the description of the roads very insightful due to their practical non-existence; all back country road, mud and the occasional small town). And it is in one of the first small city stops that they make do they run into Milt Daggett, the owner of the local car shop. At first sight, Daggett falls for Claire and what will only sound as creepy in this summary, decides then and there to follow her and her father all the way to Seattle. Stalker? Knight in shining armor? That is what I will leave for you to find out if you read Free Air.
This book was popular enough on its publication to have been made into a silent film in 1922, starring Tom Douglas as Milt Daggett and Marjorie Seaman as Claire Boltwood. -
It's 1919 and Miss Claire Boltwood of Brooklyn and her father are on a road trip. They are driving west from Minneapolis to Seattle.
Think about it. Most of the roads are not paved. You have to buy gas in cans from a hardware store. The only mechanic in a small Montana town might be the blacksmith. Claire had to know her engine and how to fix it, how to repair and replace tires, how to drive up steep inclines and, more important, down them (in 2nd gear using both the foot and hand brakes.) The book mentions that the road down the western side of Snoqualmie Pass is paved with loose gravel. The road on the eastern side is just ruts down the mountain.
During their somewhat eventful trip, Claire and her father are rescued when their Gomez-Dep auto gets stuck in the mud by Milt Daggett, a lad from a very small town not far from Gopher Prairie, a location familiar to readers of Sinclair Lewis' next book, Main Street. Milt takes a liking to Claire and decides to make a road trip himself and follow her. He is a mechanic and owns a shop so he can hand it over to be run by his assistant and take off for Seattle.
After a couple of additional saves the Boltwoods come to appreciate the rough, countrified Milt. He has decided to put his mechanical ability to better use and enrolls in the University of Washington to earn a degree in mechanical engineering. But Claire's wealthy suitor from New York and her wealthy friends on Queen Ann Hill don't see what endears Milt to her.
The question is, can a wealthy society girl and a boy from a small town in the midwest with no appreciable education make a go of it?
The book held particular interest for me and it will for the rest of the 22nd Avenue Book Club here in Spokane because so much of the action takes place in Washington. Claire falls in love with the names of the towns and cities of the state and makes a free verse poem of them, from Cle Elum and Humptulips to Walla Walla and Mukilteo. The travelers move quickly through Spokane but they visit and linger in other places like Yakima and eventually Seattle. -
The first half of this book was a surprise to me. I had never thought of what the highways across America would have been like at their beginning, when the idea of a cross-country car trip was completely novel and daring. I wish there had been more details about that, I wish the whole book had been about the road trip. The fact that it's a young woman driving the car (with her father as passenger - he couldn't drive, not having learned how) made the story that much more interesting. Of course, it was a stupid idea - if the car had broken down - I mean, other than flat tires and such - they could have been stranded indefinitely in the back of nowhere without supplies and prey to the local wildlife (of course, all of these things and worse do happen, but so does a certain Guardian Angel, which rather trivializes the whole endeavor). Nonetheless! I was intrigued. What on earth did the countryside look like back then? Can you imagine the roads? Gravel? Pavement? There certainly weren't the side-rails we are so familiar with on the mountain passes! Goll-ly! And what did Glacier Mountain Park look like back in 1919 anyway? And they stop at the Grand Canyon, too. Geez. Wish I could've seen that!
The rest of the book was piffle. I mean, in comparison. It was light and fun and I won't remember it next week. It was interesting more by contrast with another road trip book I accidentally happen to be reading simultaneously (having no reading plan causes some collisions) - in which the attitude towards the role of women is completely opposite. In "Free Air", Milt (the main male character) actually refuses to take over for Claire after aiding her in a bad situation, by saying that she is perfectly capable of taking charge of the situation herself.
Anyway, I mostly enjoyed this book. It got me looking into the history of highways in N. America, and I do like a book that makes me think. -
If, as the saying goes, cynics are just disappointed idealists, then here we have Sinclair Lewis' ideal vision of America on the cusp of his success as the razor-sharp satirist of middle America. Like Huck and Jim on their raft, Claire and Milt represent the great American ideal--freedom, equality, and a sense of adventure. They embrace a pioneer spirit born of blue collar pragmatism that at once desires and rejects wealth and class stature. Lewis' description of the great Western road trip is passionate and fun, but always singed with an underlying uneasiness about class. In the decades leading up to the publication of this novel in 1919, traveling and leisure were becoming hallmarks of the American middle class--those who weren't rich enough to be chauffeured, but who felt above the working and lower classes who often served (and envied) them in the small town cafes and hotels they visited. What begins as a screwball comedy adventure story (this would have made a glorious 1930s comedy) turns into a portrait of class fears: falling in class, not living up one's class, being reminded of a lower class upbringing, etc.
While we begin to see the scathing Lewis of the 20s emerge in the jokes and wry comments scattered throughout the text ("Isn't it delightful that this is such a democratic country, with no castes," said Claire.), the novel has a happy, hopeful, perhaps even sappy ending. It's the ending we all WISH might happen--in an ideal world. -
This book was great. I love old pulp, especially when it's a wild journey, and this road trip book was a fun and exciting read. I went through a bunch of public domain kindle books just browsing, and I figured I would read a page or two of each to see what caught my attention. This book caught me on the first page.
I'ts very light like others have mentioned, but it does get you thinking about society and lifestyles and how things haven't really changed all that much in almost 100 years. But it's not preachy or slanted either way.
I found a lot of stuff in this book I could relate to, a lot of the feelings and emotions are ones we've all had, and the characters in the book are very relatable. There are some good plot twists and enough danger to keep you on your seat, but this is by no means a "thriller" nor does it try to be.
I love the time period it's set in, and Lewis paints an excellent picture without focusing too much on the details. It's a nice step back into a different time but it's a story that could happen today.
What I liked best about the book was the characters. So many interesting people displayed so well, and Milt is salt of the earth, and as likeable as they come.
Going to find a paper edition of this book and read it again. Definitely worth it! -
Written in 1919 this story is one of the first in the tradition of road trip books. Jaunty with the verbal slapstick comedy and slang it is a great little piece of the era. Lewis has as his hero the working man Milt who is in love, maybe, with the upper class Claire. They meet on on a cross country journey on the New American Road, he in his inexpensive flivver car and she and her father in their deluxe import. The art of driving and how travelers spend the nights, meals and other accommodations is the biggest draw to the story to modern readers I suppose and it was very successful on publication to a a public who was embracing the merits of the automobile. Lewis envisions the automobile as a great equalizer of the classes and that is reflected in so much of this book. In the show Boardwalk Empire this is the book Jimmy and Pearl spend days reading and dreaming of traveling west, so nice nod to a little book that hopefully will keep resurfacing every now and then.
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I can't remember the last book I read that made me smile and laugh so often. Lewis' prose is so fluid and so full of life and character. Free Air has instantly become one of my favorite love stories, and hopefully the start of a great literary romance with Lewis' works.
A special thank you to Steven Michels' essay on
Public Domain Review, "American Freedom: Sinclair Lewis and the Open Road," for introducing me to the book and linking me to a PDF of the original printing. -
I loved this book- it has it all: adventure, romance, etc.
Held my interest and was very entertaining; perhaps some would say it leans towards being didactic, but that didn’t bother me.
I highly recommend it. -
An absolute delight. I won't give it away, but it is just a light-hearted romp taking place in the early 1900s.
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A road trip from Minnesota to Seattle that devolved into straw-man hackery and a predictable love triangle. The least of the four novels by Lewis that I have read.
Pretty much everyone sucks except the protagonists. They're either stuck up snobs from Claire's life or rubes they encounter on the roadside. Lewis looks down his nose at both, and the same. damn. problems. from apparently every other book he ever wrote - the man had no talent as a satirist - rear their ugliness here.
The bright spots - hey, what would it have been like to drive from Minnesota to Seattle a hundred years ago? I made the drive in reverse four years ago and it was almost as empty as it is in the book. I don't believe I hit a city of even 50K people between Spokane and Minneapolis. Here, we see bad roads; a grifter who digs potholes in front of his house to trap drivers, who he then charges to pull out; dirty hotels, and the occasional crazy person with a gun. There are highwaymen, potential rapists, and bears (Oh my!), but not to worry, good 'ol white knight Daggett is there to save the day every time. He even gets edumacated and squares off against Claire's old wealthy beau from the big city, showing he can fit in at the opera. (I tell you, the practicality of it.)
What can I say? This was not all that different than a modern day Hallmark movie. Harmless and cute, with the snobs getting their comeuppance, but there's no depth here.
I feel I need to read Dodsworth to close out Lewis. As of now I give a mild recommendation to Arrowsmith and Main Street, with Babbitt having completely left my memory and Free Air just not quite worth the time. -
Published before 1920 and it was contemporary at the time, so is it right to call it historical?
It was interesting to hear what it might have been like to drive across the country around that time. I was delighted enough with this "contemporary history" that I don't know how much I cared about the story, I think I liked it.
There is a section about how important the view is to people in Seattle and I think that might still be true.
Chapter 24
After breakfast, she went out on the terrace for the View.
In Seattle, even millionaires, and the I. W. W., and men with red garters on their exposed shirt-sleeves who want to give you real estate, all talk about the View. The View is to Seattle what the car-service, the auditorium, the flivver-factory, or the price of coal is to other cities. At parties in Seattle, you discuss the question of whether the View of Lake Union or the View of the Olympics is the better, and polite office-managers say to their stenographers as they enter, "How's your View this morning?" All real-estate deeds include a patent on the View, and every native son has it as his soundest belief that no one in Tacoma gets a View of Mount Rainier.
Mrs. Gilson informed Claire that they had the finest View in Seattle. -
What a charming early novel by Sinclair Lewis. One can see it as a transitional work between his Saturday Evening Post stories of love and adventure and his groundbreaking social critique Main Street. Claire Boltwood, a rich young woman from Brooklyn, and her father drive across the country to help him regain his health. Travel by automobile in the first part of the twentieth century was difficult as many roads were not paved and many small towns with few hotels. Claire crosses paths with Milt Daggett, a garage mechanic from Minnesota, who falls in love with her and decides to drive west at the same time as a sort of guardian angel. They sort of fall in love, but the class differences are quite great. He tries to remake himself, going to engineering school, learning bridge, and buying a new suit, while she realizes that the pretensions of her class make her feel cut off from the real world. It’s a cute, episodic romance, and well worth reading.
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Read as an audiobook, mostly before bed. I chose it for the early automobile road trip plot, but it turned out to be a romantic comedy. (I never thought Lewis wrote those!) Claire, her father, and her fast roadster are helped on the road by Milt, a good Midwestern boy, and his slow but reliable flivver. They don't want to feel too obligated, however, so Claire dismisses Milt and he trails behind just in case. Then some more trouble happens along the route to Seattle, they bond, and Claire discovers the bliss of true freedom before being plopped into Western society and all of its expectations. To her credit, she tries to help Milt rise to her class by encouraging him to become an engineer because she insists that she cannot give up the small luxuries to which she is accustomed. Well, everything comes to a head and Claire has to choose between superficial society and truly living. Fortunately, the latter is worth the cost.
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I loved this book, and not for any traditional literary reasons. The plot is simple enough, the characters just enough developed to be memorable. The reason I couldn't put it down was its power to immerse me in a different world: the American West at the turn of the century. Unlike other books of that setting, it's not about cowboys and gold miners, but about ordinary folks grappling with a new democratic world in which Eastern money and birth have a questionable and declining influence. It's about young people who see the happy possibility of freedom from traditional restrictions of class, wealth, and gender. A thoroughly delightful romp along the roads of a nation wonderfully changing.
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What makes this boy-meets-girl novel special is the character of both the boy and the girl, as well as the period in which it was written. A cross-country drive from Brooklyn to Seattle was a grand adventure 100 years ago; it was delightful to experience it through the eyes of Claire, a courageous feminist who was just a little uncertain about whether there were any important differences between "high society" and "common people." The scenery, the people, the struggles with a recalcitrant automobile -- altogether a delightful read.
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I was most intrigued by the glimpses into what it would have been like to drive across the country around the time of World Ward I. That was just the backdrop to this old story, and no doubt it was a bit fictionalized, but it did give me a bit of an idea of what automobile travel was like before highways, freeways, and such existed. Otherwise, the story itself is dated and full of stereotypes that wouldn't fly today. Reading it was like watching black-and-white sitcoms from decades back--too outdated to recommend.
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I very much like Sinclair Lewis, having read most of his "big" novels, and I found this early book to be entertaining and rather surprising in its often frivolous tone. (Though it has its serious episodes as well.) It loses steam in the final chapters after the automobile tour has concluded (I assume these were the add-on installments to the story, as it originally appeared in the SATURDAY EVENING POST), but they are only less engaging in comparison to what preceded them.
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3.5/5 stars
Overall, this was a refreshing and interesting story about a road trip from the past. It held my attention for the most part, and as a fashion historian, I was pleasantly surprised at lengthy mentions of appropriate clothing from this 1919 primary resource.
Slightly predictable and a bit of the "same old" from time to time, but a pleasant read.
Fun fact: I live blocks outside of Upper Montclair, NJ, and it was randomly mentioned as a location near NYC. Very cool.
