THERE has been a remarkable transition in the recent novels of Sinclair Lewis — a transition in technique. It is as if the author had grown less interested in people and more interested in ideas. Gone are those full-length portraits of Carol Kennicott, George Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Gantry, painted with the hard, clear detail of a Van Dyck. In their stead we have lesser folk, people whose doings typify the mass movements, the current ideas, which keep our world in flux. Because Mr. Lewis is one of the most perceptive writers of our age, his new books are swift to apprehend our domestic crises. He has led a crusade in behalf of the lone professional woman; he has warned us of the danger that lies in Fascism; and now in his latest novel, The Prodigal Parents (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50), he dramatizes still another conflict that has made itself felt in homes as in college communities — the war between the younger and the older generation, the battle between children and their parents, between aspiration and experience.
Sachem Falls, New York, is the arena, and Fredk. Wm. Cornplow is the antagonist of this story. Fred is a high-pressure salesman of automobiles and trailers; he is fifty-six, and has been made portly, exuberant, and conservative by his success — the epitome, if you like, of a middleclass American parent. Picture him as he might be played to-day by George M. Cohan. But there is a sharp and irritable demarcation between Fred and his college children, Sara and Howard; and when they follow the lead of a half-baked agitator and begin to organize the Workers International Cohesion in Sachem, Fred retaliates by threatening to retire from business — and the war is on.
This is an essential antagonism Mr. Lewis is pointing at, and certainly it provides the novelist with enough farce and satire to keep The Prodigal Parents in constant motion. But I do wish that Mr. Lewis’s characters were real enough to be taken seriously. Fred Cornplow (what a name!), with his collapsible trailer, his honest indignation, his salty distrust of psychoanalysis and Communism — well, call him a cousin of George Babbitt’s. But Fred’s identity is weakened by the excesses of his children. For they are caricatures: they talk like actors in a college farce, Sara with her vinegar, Howard with his stupidity, Annabel with her pretty appeal — they have none of them been ‘implemented’ with what it takes to make a collegiate rebel of to-day. I cannot believe that Mr. Lewis has lost sight of the redheads now in their twenties; I should have supposed that his early rebelliousness would have made him sympathetic to the same mood in others. But selfishness and irresponsibility are what anger him here, and these he has exaggerated beyond belief. It is an unpalatable conclusion that, this book shows our foremost novelist at his second best, and that in his pursuit of ideas he has indulged his sense of humor but has minimized his great talent for characterization.
