Ann Vickers

1933, 1994 University of Nebraska Press edition
Sinclair Lewis
Ann Vickers
Original price $15.00, bought used for $7.49
Slightly worn paperback
B

This is the first book I own to acknowledge the Great Depression, but that's far from the only bit of realism.  The title character (who keeps her maiden name even after marriage) grows from a tomboy to a popular but controversial college student to a suffrage campaigner to a prison reformer to a prison administrator to, well, the ending leaves that a question mark.  Along the way, she loves and/or marries a few Mr. Wrongs.  She becomes pregnant twice, the first time having an abortion, which she almost immediately regrets, the second time having a child by her lover, the married judge, while being quite honest to her husband that she's only staying married to him so that the baby will have a father.  When Barney the judge is sent to prison for taking bribes, Ann ends her marriage and waits for Barney to be free, which he becomes in the last few pages, thanks to another judge, another ex-boyfriend.

Ann is definitely a flawed character, in different ways of course from Martin Arrowsmith.  It says a lot that she imagines that the child she doesn't bear during wartime would've been named Pride.  It says an equal amount that she thinks the qualities that make Russell a bad husband would make him a good father.  To some extent, Ann is more self-aware than other Lewis protagonists, except for maybe Dodsworth, but she does have blind spots.  She sees that Barney is the sort of man that she's been rebelling against all her life, but she's devoted to him anyway.

Lewis takes a lot of jabs at radicals in this novel, but I don't think he's any harsher than he was to the Republicans in Babbitt and elsewhere.  Much of Ann's disillusionment comes from the contrast of ideals, her own and others', with reality.  There are only two sets of villains in this book who are shown with no nuance or complexity.  The first of these are, not surprisingly, the people who run Copperhead Prison.

The second set is lesbians.  It feels weird to use the "LGBT" label on a book that's so homophobic, but homosexuality, particularly female, keeps coming up so that I can't ignore it.  (Then why not retroactively go back and put "African-American" on Pudd'nhead Wilson?  Well, I never claimed the labels are all encompassing.  Think of them as helpful rather than definitive.)  While other Lewis books mention homosexuals, they aren't as significant as they are here.  Is this because the main character is female and single?

I think it's more to do with that she's based partly on Lewis's second wife, Dorothy Thompson, who was bisexual.  Lewis was uncomfortable with her "romantic friendships," and so he makes Ann recoil from lesbians, whether in college, the New York intellectual scene, or prison.  While Ann gets fed up with men sometimes, both politically and romantically, she can see why they are the way they are, and she doesn't even hold much of a grudge against the soldier who seduces and abandons her.  But the most horrific relationship in the book is that between Ann's friend Eleanor and Dr. Isabel, who belittles and isolates Eleanor to the point of suicide.  Then within hours of the two of them finding Eleanor's dead body, Isabel suggests she and Ann run off to Europe together!

That said, Ann's most significant, though strictly platonic, relationship is with another female doctor.  Dr. Malvina helps her with both pregnancies, in two very different ways, stands by her when she stands by Barney, and generally is the good loyal friend.

Apparently, the 1933 movie version, while pre-Code, changes and omits quite a bit, including Ann's marriage to Russell.  I think book-Ann would chuckle and then sigh wearily at that.