'Telling You All to Go To Hell'

GH on an old novel made new

Sinclair Lewis (right) as his alter ego Doremus Jessup in the 1938 theatrical adaptation of It Can’t Happen Here

‘The situation of our time/Surrounds us like a baffling crime’: WH Auden’s couplet could have been written yesterday rather than eighty years ago. And in times such as these, there develops a hunger for those works of art that seem to resonate, anticipate or even explain the origins of crisis. Eighteen Eighty-Four never gets old. Recent candidates include Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Great Gatsby or The Buried Giant. At risk of adding to your reading pile, let me propose another: It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis, the first American Nobel Laureate for literature. It had a moment during the first Trump administration, being credited with prophetic qualities as it emerged in a new edition; but it may be a better match for Trump’s second term, as it slides into elective dictatorship and exuberant kakistocracy. Being ninety years old, the presidency of Lewis’s imagined demagogue Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip resembles Trump’s as a Model T resembles a Tesla. But the novel’s bold strokes evoke timeless sentiments about the United States, about political power, about civic complaisance. Right now, to be sure, it’s easy to assent in Lewis’s late life reflection: ‘I love America, but I don’t like it.’