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Sinclair Lewis
Your Title:THE INNOCENTS: A STORY FOR LOVERS (1917) Reviews and Remarks by Patrick Killough (A) Review for http://www.barnesandnoble.com The Innocents: A Story for Lovers ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here is how your review will appear on the title page: REVIEWER: Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), a fan of Sinclair Lewis, August 18, 2005, RATING GIVEN TO THIS NOVEL: Three Stars * * * TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: Find a Friendly Village and Live Content In New York City lives a couple, born a decade before the American civil war, married for 40 years and on the brink of WW I at story's beginning. They are Mr Seth Appleby and Mrs Sarah Jane Appleby, often called simply 'Father' and 'Mother.' They have a married daughter, Lulu, who lives with husband and young son in a New York town. Mother and Father are THE INNOCENTS of Sinclair Lewis's 1917 serialized short novel. After some decades in Pilkings & Son's Shoe Parlor, Seth Appleby has worked his way up to become to Mr Pilkings roughly what Dagwood Bumstead is to Julius Dithers, albeit even more under-appreciated and under-challenged than Dagwood. During their annual two week vacation on Cape Cod, Father and Mother treat the owners of their vacation home during a country automobile drive to a snack at Ye Tea Shoppe. Expecting a bill for their simple fare of no more than ninety cents, Father is astonished to be charged $3.60. He calculates that sum to represent a 500% markup on the food served. Suddenly, in a road to Damascus moment, running a tea shop seems an attractive alternative to fitting big city swells with footwear. Deciding no longer to be a prisoner of daily routine, Father persuades a cautious Mother to open their own tea shop on Cape Cod. Back in Gotham, they sell all they own, buy a cheap mixture of knickknacks and china and burn their bridges behind them, although Father understands that Pilkings Senior guarantees him a job selling shoes if and when he returns to New York City. The Applebys run their tea shop from May through September but never make a go of it. Their hearts and resolve are finally broken when they overhear a rich woman and her daughter tear their establishment to pieces as an exhibition of rampant poor taste. Frantically but confidently, Father tries to get his old job back. But Pilkings Senior has fallen ill and Junior does not want him. Both Applebys take temporary jobs around Christmas time that do not last. They attempt suicide by turning on the gas in their rented apartment, but they survive. An interlude of moving in with their daughter's family proves intolerable and the Applebys sneak away as 'prodigal parents' (Ch. IX) and go on the open road. Seth fantasizes about earning their keep by playing his mouth organ. But they do better than simply get by and are content as they pad along, sleeping in barns in New Jersey and West Virginia and doing chores for kindly farmers. Their health improves and Seth becomes a useful wood chopper. Their fortunes turn up definitively in February during a stay at a hobo community in West Virginia. Mother cooks and mends the men's clothing. Hobo leader Crook McKusick takes Father under his wing and teaches him rhetorical and body language tricks for appearing imposing and a leader of men. When the couple moves on, Seth's new confidence works as McKusick intended. Mother had inspired the hoboes to clean up their language and come to relish bathing. Come springtime, the vagrants break camp and scatter to the winds. They spread the story of the wandering Applebys. A Boston newspaper writes a Sunday story of Mother and Father as two wealthy New Yorkers exploring the world and expounding the simple life. (Ch. XV) In gullible, kind-hearted America their fortune is made, largely unbeknownst to the Applebys themselves. With $6.20 left, they reach the friendly village of Lippsittsville, Indiana where they are recognized and cherished. For his expertise with shoes, Seth Appleby is offered and accepts a 30% share in Lippsittsville Pioneer Shoe Store. His celebrity causes customers to pour in. He rents a new cottage for Mother and the old couple is more than content with their new prosperity. Then their son-in-law arrives by train to fetch them away to life in an old folks home in New York. But the townspeople have arranged a dressy party for Seth and Sarah Jane and sing the old couple's praises. The newly deferential son-in-law is sent home to New York and the Applebys settle into life in an idyllic midwestern American village. This is a fast paced, good humored tale well worth a publisher's reviving. -OOO- Also recommended: O. Henry, 'The Gift of the Magi.' Charles Dickens, THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. Mark Schorer, SINCLAIR LEWIS AN AMERICAN LIFE. Ovid, PHILEMON AND BAUCIS. =-=-=-===-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- (B) Review for http://www.amazon.com EVALUATION OF THIS NOVEL: FOUR STARS * * * * TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: The Right American Village Can Make Anyone Happy, August 18, 2005 Reviewer: T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews Sinclair Lewis usually had difficulty describing married couples who were each other's equals or at least contributed nearly equally as partners in their "divisions of labor." This negative charge cannot, however, be laid against his second of two novels published in 1917, THE INNOCENTS: A STORY FOR LOVERS. For forty of their sixty years Seth and Sarah Jane Appleby have been married and living in New York City. They raised one daughter who married a successful pharmacist and produced a male heir. Seth brings home the bacon from his job as something more than a clerk and salesman at a shoe store. Sarah Jane makes a happy home. The balance of their power does begin to shift one summer when Seth, not without a certain economic sense, decides to break out of his metropolitan rut and open a Tea Shop on rural Cape Cod where the couple has long spent its two week vacations. They bring to this project equally weak skills in selecting china and chairs and in the end lose their shirts in less than five months. After further setbacks, they begin a wandering life together. Through New Jersey they tramp. Then at a hobo camp in West Virginia, Seth's star begins to rise. Sarah Jane indeed makes friends of the villainous looking hoboes, cooks their food, mends their clothes and brings about a reformation of manners and morals. But one of the tramps sees some potential for bigger things in Seth and coaches him in physical fitness, little tricks of body language and rhetoric which propel him into a leader's self-confidence. He and she return to the open road with the confidence of Christian apostles after Pentecost. Seth almost overawes his loyal wife with his developing talents but their mutual affection allows the couple to create a new, mutually satisfying equilibrium. Call it flight. Call it travel. Call it greener grass across the road. But one persistent theme in both Sinclair Lewis's personal life and in his novels is that sheer movement, sheer trying out something completely new and different, simply hitting the trail -- all or some of these -- will almost surely bring good results, something better. "It's always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are" (Ch. XIII). Seth to Sarah Jane: "Let's see. New York doesn't want us. But somewhere there must be a village of folks that does. .. Come on, we'll start for Japan, and see the cherry-blossoms. Come on, old partner, we're going to pioneer, like our daddies that went West" (Ch. XII). Finally, Chapter XVII has a paean to small town living that could have been written by Paul Harris, who tried in 1905, via establishing the world's first Rotary Club, to re-create in cutthroat, impersonal Chicago the virtues and general chumminess of the Wallingford, Vermont village (population 1,000) where he grew up. It is hard to imagine the same Sinclair Lewis writing so glowingly of village life in 1917 when he would show its unlovely side only three years later in MAIN STREET. And yet, there it is: "In a village, every clerk, every tradesman, has something of the same distinctive importance as the doctors, the lawyers, the ministers. ... "in Lippittsville Mr. Seth Appleby was not just a lowly person who helped one in the choice of shoes. He was a person, he was their brother, to be loved or hated." The indiscriminate call of everyone by first name that Lewis would condemn a decade later in ELMER GANTRY's Zenith Rotary Club appears perfectly natural and amiable in the village of THE INNOCENTS. Sinclair Lewis never lost the ability to surprise, just as Babe Ruth, even aging, was always capable on any given day of hitting one out of the ball park. -OOO- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= |