"Cass Timberlane" is a novel written by Sinclair Lewis in 1945. Almost everyone that reads the book loves the book. Having said that I personally know noone who has read, will read or has ever even heard of the book. But from reviews I've read most people enjoy the book. Except me of course. If this had been the first Sinclair Lewis novel I read I probably would have stopped there. I just didn't like it. I have read hundreds of books and re-read dozens of them. I always finish a book, well almost always. There were two I gave up on, Cass Timberlane was nearly the third. I began the book with high hopes having enjoyed so many Sinclair Lewis books before, by page 20 I just wasn't enjoying the story but it often takes me awhile to get into a story so I kept going. At the halfway point I really expected to be interested in the characters and their lives, I wasn't. By page 300 I was just looking forward to it all ending.
Our main character is Cass Timberlane which you probably already figured out. He is a judge in the fictional city Grand Republic, Minnesota. Now you would think from reading the book that Cass is one of the oldest people in the town even though we are told on the first page that he was a young judge, age forty-one, in his first year on the bench. He meets the love of his life, Virginia "Jinny" Marshland when she testifies in his court, by page 5 he is in love with her. The narrator tells us however that:
"She was perhaps twenty-four to his forty-one, but he insisted that Jinny and he were young together....."
So Jinny is young and he is old. While it is true that Jinny is 24 years old and Cass is 41, the difference in their ages doesn't seem so shocking to me. After all, my husband and I have them beat by a year, our age gap being 18 years. Then there is also:
"Why should a charming girl, probably a dancer to phonographs, have any desire to cure the lonelinesses of forty-year-old single gentlemen? There was tenderness and loyalty in Jinny, he felt, but what would she want with a judge whom she would find out not to be a judge at all but another gaunt and early-middle-aged man who played the flute?"
How in the world does he know there is tenderness and loyalty in her when he hasn't even talked to her yet? And there is that age gap mentioned again. The plot of the book is certainly marriage, and the marriage of Cass and Jinny is the main focus. Cass is serious, he loves being a judge, he loves working and when he comes home he loves being in his study with his books. Sounds good to me. Jinny however, is easily bored, in about five minutes she is ready for something new. She does seem to be fond of Cass and she will try for awhile, five minutes or so, to fit into his life, but then boredom takes over and there she goes again. Jinny loves parties, and lunches, dinners out, dancing, acting, flirting with men, anything she thinks of as exciting, and Cass isn't exciting. Cass runs around, or I guess I should say walks around, he is an old judge after all, telling everyone that Jinny is a goddess and an angel, it would be annoying even if it were true. When Jinny finally leaves him for a more exciting man in a more exciting city no one could be surprised. Don't worry though there is more to the story or I wouldn't have told you what may have been the ending.
During all this, just sort of thrown in here and there are stories called "An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives" they are interspersed throughout the book, and they presents the bleakest collection of marriages I think I've ever read. In more than one story the people in it either commit or try to commit suicide, in one a husband seems to be in love with his daughter, one husband tricks his wife into having an affair so he can divorce her, everyone is miserable. Wives are called vicious, cow-like, shrill, stubborn and monotonous. One married story that did make me smile was of a man and a woman that had been married for fifty years:
"He loved porridge for breakfast, and every morning, three hundred and sixty-five mornings a year, they had porridge. It was after thirty-two years of it that Fanny reported, a bit reluctantly, "I think I'm beginning to like the nasty stuff."
In another marriage:
"Beecher usually went to sleep to her inane discussion of something that would have happened if it had only happened."
We also have one husband, a superintendent of schools:
"He was referred to in the press as 'one of our greatest builders', because during his reign there had been erected three red-brick school-buildings which looked like red-brick school-buildings."
And finally I did smile when I read this:
"Some of these smart-aleck critics claim that Middlewestern businessmen haven't changed much since that book--what's its name?-- by this Communist writer, Upton Sinclair--"Babbitt," is it?--not changed much since that bellyache appeared, some twenty years ago."
I wanted to like this book, I wanted to love this book, I expected to because after all it was by the author of "Babbitt"one of my favorites. When I got to that last page though I was just glad it was over. Read the book and let me know what you think of it. Am I glad I read it? Well, even reading a book I don't like is better than not reading a book at all, but I could have picked a better one.