Main Street Revisited

LOWER THAN ANGELS--Walter Karig --Farrar & Rinehart ($2.75).

Sinclair Lewis gave the world its classic picture of the American conformist. Whether he was known as Babbitt, Doc Kennicott, Joe Doakes or the great American boob, this monster was terrible, and to escape him (or his wife) the intellectuals of the 1920s fled from Main Street.

The U.S. Average Man is now beloved and honored. When he is in uniform, Ernie Pyle and a host of other correspondents watch him, note his casual expressions, solicit his opinions, record his hopes and fears, marvel at his fortitude. When he is in civilian clothes, the public opinion polls eagerly tabulate his beliefs, his prejudices, his tastes. Few contemporary novels reflect this revolution in the status of the Average Man so sharply as Lower than Angels. Its hero is a character Sinclair Lewis might have drawn: Marvin Lang, son of a Staten Island delicatessen merchant. The story records his progress to a butcher shop, to the Army in World War I, to ownership of a prosperous market.

There are only two settings in Lower than Angels. One is Brooklyn, where Marvin lived until he was ten, in a railroad flat in Grandma Lang's home. It was full of beaded curtains, canaries, chairs with claw feet and red leather seats, gaslights, knickknacks, onyx clocks and vases filled with cattails. From an upstairs window Marvin could look down upon flower gardens and a spider's web of clotheslines forever hung with grey underwear. His father, who then had charge of the hardware section of Bohan's department store, was a Republican with firm convictions about religion: "Live and let live is my motto. A man can be a better Christian than most and not go near a church."

Delicatessen Adventure. The other setting is the Lang delicatessen store in the village of Belle Bay on Staten Island. Bought with the $6,500 the Langs got for Grandma's house, the store was the biggest adventure of their lives. Until this point, Lower than Angels seems only another story of the decline of the lower middle class. But this store makes money. A tan, two-story-and-attic house, with its porch remodeled into a store front, it stood in a village where there were sycamore and elm trees over the streets, a Methodist Church where Marvin got converted in a whirlwind revival campaign, the drugstore where he got his first job. There was a big house owned by rich people where Marvin learned to dance, and where the daughter of the family sat on his lap in the living room after school. Not far away was an obscure building disguised as a fortuneteller's establishment, where hoarse-voiced prostitutes introduced Marvin to sex.

But the unchanging center of his life was the delicatessen. There he retreated when his girl left him, and recovered his selfesteem. He went back to it when his wartime job in a munitions factory blew up. He rested upstairs while he recovered from the attack of "appendicitis" he caught from a girl he picked up.

Honest History. Husky, grey-haired Walter Karig, 46, a veteran Washington correspondent, is now a Navy commander. He co-authored the first volume of Battle Report (TIME, Dec. 11), is now working on the second. His style is breezy, formless, effective. Like Sinclair Lewis' books, Lower than Angels is remarkable for its accumulation of commonplace social history, and for its unsparing honesty. It is sometimes little more than a catalogue of impressions, saved from tedium and pretentiousness by Karig's humor. Marvin Lang has all the characteristics of Babbitt. He is smug, ambitious, self-righteous, calculating. Unlike Babbitt, he has a mean streak, especially in his relations with women. His life is actually harsher than Babbitt's was. But his enjoyment of his stale jokes is genuine; his faith in his secondhand opinions is profound; his comic-strip adventures with girls and jobs are funny.

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