It Can’t Happen Here (1935)

Sinclair Lewis turns his hand to the literature of dystopia and makes a creditable job of it. His fascist takeover of the US (much like the one we are mired in and resisting?) is modeled closely on Nazi Germany. In fact, I was surprised by how much seemed to be common knowledge in 1934 and 1935 when Lewis was working on the novel. It turns out Lewis’s wife at the time, Dorothy Thompson, was the first US journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, in 1934, which probably accounts for it. He had a front-row seat. There are lots of familiar Lewis notes here: extravagantly ridiculous names (Doremus Jessup and Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip are basically the principals, plus a Unitarian “radical” named Lorinda Pike), dreary extramarital affairs, and an implicit and almost corny faith in the so-called American experiment in democracy. I think a lot of readers would complain about the surplus of “telling” and the relative lack of “showing.” It gets sloggy in patches. But in the 2020s It Can’t Happen Here has all kinds of markers of prescience. It goes to some extremes that are hard to believe, but much of it is actually all too believable. Lewis knows exactly, for example, that US fascist shock troops would look and talk and act like the goons we saw attacking the Capitol two years ago. The main point of this novel is by way of warning, which the title dryly emphasizes. It’s ultimately not that hard-hitting—though we see terrible things—because it softens the blows with broad streaks of US sentimentalism. It takes heart, for example, in the Underground Railroad to free slaves and the North’s win in the Civil War, and chooses, like many of us, to ignore the ways in which the South won and continues to win that conflict—which isn’t over yet, by the way. Lewis certainly knew that much in 1935. Black Americans get the worst of it as usual, though antisemitism in many ways is the face of this fascism, as in Germany. So altogether a mixed bag—it’s not always believable, but when it is it can be shocking just for its familiarities. The story is illustrative and the characters more allegorical. But there is a gnawing sense that this is what it would look like. I know this novel went into lots of lists of books we were supposed to read after Trump was elevated to power in 2016. So I’m late to the party again as usual. It Can’t Happen Here is a good Sinclair Lewis novel, or not bad, and it speaks eloquently to our current predicament.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.