It Can't Happen Here

1935, 1970 Signet edition
Sinclair Lewis
It Can't Happen Here
Original price unknown, bought used for $1.50
Very worn paperback
C+


While Lewis's idea of a very American form of fascism, with a folksy President, is intriguing, and it's fun to see how he imagines everyone from FDR to the Hearst newspaper writers reacting to it, unfortunately this novel contains his worst characterization so far.  Even at the most cartoony, like parts of Babbitt, there's always been a sense of real human beings, with plausible thoughts and emotions, inside the caricatures. 

To take a small but representative example, the hero Doremus Jessup is supposed to be very fond of his grandson, and yet the grandson does nothing endearing, and acts more like five or six, rather than eight to ten.  They have no bonding moments, and all we hear of the lad is that he wants to grow up to be a M.M. (one of the "Minute Men," the thugs the government employs, like a Brown Shirt).  Add to that the most lackluster romance of any Lewis novel-- I was more invested in Elmer/Juanita!-- between Doremus and Lorinda, which isn't even brought up till about 100 pages in, and it's hard to believe in any of the relationships or feelings in the book.  Only Doremus's elder daughter, Mary, with her suicidal assassination, seemed to have believable emotion, and she of course is crazy with grief. 

Doremus's younger daughter, Sissy, flippantly jokes about rape, at the same time that the narrator is reporting rapes of offstage characters.  Most of the horrors are offstage, till Doremus and nearly every other "good" male character goes to jail.  That part is better done, although of course unpleasant to read.

Lewis, who fifteen years earlier, in Main Street, seemed to realize that homophobia is more dangerous than homosexuality, makes the main villain-- Lee Sarason, the power behind the throne-- a decadent homosexual, and there are some effeminate gay M.M.s earlier.  

When I first read this book, during the Reagan 1980s, I thought it could happen here, and it was wonderful to read of someone long ago pointing out the dangers of homegrown fascism.  Now I think that while it could hypothetically happen, I think it less and less would happen in this way, particularly with changes in technology, most notably the Internet.  In the painfully dated introduction by Jay Richard Kennedy, he says, "Dig it," and wants you to realize how prescient Lewis was.  But the days of Huey Long, and those of George Wallace, are long gone.  So even if I think, "Hm, 'almost a dwarf, yet with an enormous head, a bloodhound head, of huge ears, pendulous cheeks, mournful eyes....a luminous, ungrudging smile,' sounds a little like Ross Perot," that doesn't mean that I think Perot or any politician is Buzz Windrip.

This novel inspired both a Frank Zappa song and the miniseries V.