What the Swedes Read: Sinclair Lewis

• LAUREATE:  Sinclair Lewis (United States, 1930)
• BOOK READ: Main Street

It began as the title of an Anthony Trollope novel, but it’s become a slogan for the kind of fiction I never understand: the Way We Live Now. For the life of me I cannot rustle up an interest in novels about the Way We Live Now. I am interested in the Way We Lived Then. I am interested in the Way We Might Live Some Other Time. But most of all I am interested in the Way We Don’t Live Now. It does not have to be the fiction of the impossible—in fact, I don’t read much that takes me to other planets with fanciful creatures—but I crave the startle of unfamiliarity, the strange glint in a sentence or a premise that draws the eye, so that when you finish the chapter and look around you, everything has been tilted and tinted until it—your own world—seems otherworldly. The last strange thing I read was a line by the Slovene poet Tomaž Šalamun: “The rise of the zebra hurts the zebra.” It’s a great line. I’m not even sure what he means by it, really. But the line camped out in my head for a while, and then suddenly I was reading a newspaper article about “the rise of democracy”—an ordinary enough phrase—and I thought, The rise of democracy hurts democracy. True or not, it was a strange little idea, and it was Šalamun who had screwed in the light bulb.

The strange illuminates the ordinary. But I don’t get what the ordinary is supposed to illuminate. I see these novels heralded as the Way We Live Now, and I read them—these basic stories in plain language that remind me of people I know in places I know doing things everybody does—and I think, Why did I stay in and read? I could have seen those people I know. We could have gone out to dinner and then maybe to a movie and I still would have had time to go home and read a few pages of something strange, something that eschewed the ordinary and the basic in favor of the “vigorous and graphic art of description and [the] ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.”

That’s how the work of Sinclair Lewis was described by the Nobel Committee when it gave him the prize, and it’s an assessment that it took me a while to grasp. I’d read quite a bit of Sinclair Lewis in college, but tellingly, it was never for a literature class but for American Studies, in cross-genric courses called things like National Epiphany and Culture And American...