It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“It Can’t Happen Here” is a semi-satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis. It was published in 1935, during the era when the Nazis were rising to power in Germany. Even though this novel is 83 years old, it has been on my mind of late. Lewis wrote this novel fourteen years before George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Like Orwell’s seminal dystopian nightmare, Sinclair’s novel has turned out to be far to prescient for comfort.

“It Can’t Happen Here” is a deceptively simple novel; a story told in a straight-forward narrative. A dictator takes over the United States. We see the first rumblings, the rise of a populist politician, the muzzling of the free press. This dictator does not take over the country by force. He is elected by the people. The reader begins to see the first inklings of something that is very, very wrong.

Let us set aside Lewis’ almost clairvoyant view into the chaos of modern politics. We can return to that in a moment. Taken on its own, “It Can’t Happen Here” is an powerful narrative full of large characters and dark deeds. There are heroes, villains, more villains, and those caught in between. The backdrop for most of the story is a quaint New England town, which makes the darkness of the story all the darker. Removed from the context of the present day, this is a novel of difficult choices in the face of great evil.

But now we return to the Author’s strangely accurate view into his future; our present. A moderate rewrite and revision would render this novel into a modern political novel. It would, I believe, be greeted with angry tweet-storms by some of the folks in power today. I will leave the rest of the political analysis to others. This is, after all, a book review.

As a reader, I found “It Can’t Happen Here” to be two books. There is a fine novel of human beings struggling against repression, a classic tale of Man vs. Society. The second book is the eerie and sometimes frightening look into a future that is my present; a future that does not look so improbable, a present that does not look so bright. Maybe Sinclair Lewis had a time machine. I suppose he could have borrowed one from H. G. Wells. Or maybe the Author had a highly developed sense of the pitfalls of modern human society. I do not know the answer to that, but reading this novel is a weird experience. It is also an experience that I highly recommend, particularly to readers who enjoy political novels, stories of societal struggles, or students of modern politics.

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