CASS TIMBERLANE

This is by all odds the best book Sinclair Lewis has given us for many seasons. Personally, I liked it much better than It Can't Happen Here, which is probably his most important book of recent years. It is a warm human story, a story of people everyone knows, of a community anyone could live in. There is none of the deliberate out of scale characterization that makes one feel -- at times -- that he is mainly a satirist. There is the inescapable sense of familiarity in characters, in situations, in background, that made Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith and Dodsworth live as household words. It is a story of marriage, the focus on Judge Timberlane and the lovely, somewhat unstable young wife, Jinny, who alternately stimulated his passion, his worship, his jealousy. But it is too the story of a community, of various types of people, patterns of marriage -- a story of an average mid-western small city today. October Book-of-the-Month selection.