Sinclair Lewis’s Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives (1945) isn’t much discussed these days. For obvious reasons, It Can’t Happen Here seems much more germane to the present moment, and it’s not one of the “big 5” of the 1920s: Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith, Dodsworth.

But it’s a worthwhile novel and innovative in ways that Lewis’s novels often aren’t. Lewis experimented with modernist stream-of-consciousness in the party scene in Ann Vickers, but largely his talent was best expressed in his acute eye for the society he was living in and for his satiric take on it. I’m not exactly going out on a limb in saying that, of course–it’s what he’s known for–but he steps away from that a bit in Cass Timberlane and tries something new, the “assemblage of husbands and wives” little vignettes of the characters’ marriages. Lewis was known taking on Big Subjects–small towns, evangelism, medicine, etc.–and this is his Marriage novel.

[Spoilers ahead if you haven’t read it.]

Cass Timberlane is a 40-something judge in Grand Republic, Minnesota; he’s divorced and has a comfortable, if predictable, life before he meets Virginia (Jinny) Marshland, a 20-something young woman who has moved to Grand Republic from her small town of Pioneer Falls and makes a living as a cartoonist for the newspaper. Instead of falling in love with the nice, age-appropriate woman who loves him (Chris Grau), he falls in love with Jinny, of course, and the course of the novel is Cass’s attempt to bridge the gaps between them: their ages, of course, which honestly wouldn’t have been the scandal in 1945 that it is today; their social class (respectable small town middle class versus the town’s elite); and their basic character differences of restlessness (Jinny) and contentment yearning to be restless (Cass). Curiously Jinny seems to have acquired the same Yale education that all of Lewis’s heroes do; she’s remarkably well-read and well-versed in history, mythology, and science and is altogether remarkable.

The short version: Cass courts her at her boarding house, and she meets his disapproving friends; they get married and go to Florida for their honeymoon in 1941; she moves into his huge old Queen Anne style house, Bergheim, where the housekeeper, Mrs. Higbee, does all the work; and then—

And then she has nothing to do except war work, cards, dinner parties. Cass spends all his time thinking of ways to entertain her, because he is utterly besotted with her because she’s a breath of fresh air and a sprite and an independent curious cat and basically we don’t know why, but the heart wants what it wants. Jinny is seriously, decidedly BORED, and it’s to Lewis’s credit that he sees this. This is Betty Friedan’s “the problem that has no name.”

Lewis addresses this early on in Cass’s sister, Rose Pennloss, who complains to Cass in a monologue about this and gets this response: “And when he insisted that if she really wanted to break away, she must quit talking, take a plain job, study, thoroughly learn some occupation, she agreed just as amiably, and did nothing” (105).

But Cass is a man of the past, as Lewis makes clear when he gives him Thoreau-like traits like playing the flute while floating in a canoe on a lake. Intellectually he understands the problem: “He had heard it often enough from his sister Rose, but he had never thoroughly understood that Jinny, with little occupation beyond asking Mrs. Higbee what she wanted her to want, would become idle, empty and bored” (182). When Jinny wants to go back to work, Cass objects: “I had hoped to have you waiting for me at the end of the day, and all fresh, not a tired working woman. . . . But is it any part of this theological doctrine of the economic independence of women . . . that women have to have independent jobs, even if it cracks up the men they love–or at least the men that love them?”

Two things.

(1) If you’ve been sitting around all day being “fresh” for when your husband comes home, what on earth would you have to talk about?

(2) Why does a woman working “crack up” the man she loves?

And Lewis can see, even if Cass can’t, that a profession could save her. When they’re looking at houses and Jinny remembers all the dimensions, etc., “It did not occur to Frank or to Cass that, with the opportunity, she would have been a better real-estate man than either of them” (223).

Well, the inevitable happens. After fighting for much of their first year of marriage, Jinny makes him leave his beloved house and move into a new one; she stars in a play (she’s a bad actress) and flirts with a succession of local Lotharios; she becomes pregnant, develops diabetes, and the baby dies; Cass, always on the move to try to please her, interviews for jobs in New York, which gives Jinny the opportunity to have an affair with his best friend, Bradd Criley. She leaves him for Bradd (in New York).

His friends are tactful, all but one: his niece Valerie, who is Rose’s daughter and is in the Women’s Army Corps. She lets Jinny have it:

“There’s a new world coming, and women’s position will change entirely. Well, it’s come, and it has changed! But there’s still ten million dolls like Aunt Jinny, that haven’t got guts enough to hold down a job or enough patience to study, and they think that modernity for women is simply being free to skip around with any men they like, and get all the jewelry and embroidered linens” (362-63).

A-men! This is Jinny to a T. As Joan Holloway used to say on Mad Men, “Tell me, what part is wrong?”

But Cass still defends Jinny: she could be like the French Resistance women “if she ever had to.” But she doesn’ t have to, so he seems fine with the status quo.

Lewis defaults to the Jane Eyre solution of making illness the great leveler. Bradd never wanted to marry her (surprise), Jinny’s diabetes gets worse, and Cass makes an emergency midnight journey to fetch her back to Grand Republic. The end of the book has them back together, with Jinny somewhat chastened but still sure of her right to do whatever she wants with Cass supporting her in every way.

Did Lewis solve the problem that has no name? No. But he’s out there warning about the problem that would soon overtake our discussions of the 1950s.