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Captain Lew Golden would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been “captain” of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and meddled with lawsuits.
He carried a quite visible mustache-comb and wore a collar, but no tie. On warm days he appeared on the street in his shirt-sleeves, and discussed the comparative temperatures of the past thirty years with Doctor Smith and the Mansion House ’bus-driver. He never used the word “beauty” except in reference to a setter dog—beauty of words or music, of faith or rebellion, did not exist for him. He rather fancied large, ambitious, banal, red-and-gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as he straggled home, and remarked that they were “nice.” He believed that all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican party. He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost quixotically honest.
This is how Sinclair Lewis's novel on the rights of working women, The Job (available on Project Gutenberg!), begins. It's a fascinating example of a well-done infodump, even as it breaks the "rules". The first sentence is an implied first half of a contrary-to-fact conditional statement! It tells you exactly what this person is like, with plenty of Is statements, and he's not even the protagonist of the story. It hooks me in an instant.
I can't imagine why I've never read anything by Sinclair Lewis before. Read about him in passing, sure, but nothing he actually wrote. I think I will start.
He carried a quite visible mustache-comb and wore a collar, but no tie. On warm days he appeared on the street in his shirt-sleeves, and discussed the comparative temperatures of the past thirty years with Doctor Smith and the Mansion House ’bus-driver. He never used the word “beauty” except in reference to a setter dog—beauty of words or music, of faith or rebellion, did not exist for him. He rather fancied large, ambitious, banal, red-and-gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as he straggled home, and remarked that they were “nice.” He believed that all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican party. He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost quixotically honest.
This is how Sinclair Lewis's novel on the rights of working women, The Job (available on Project Gutenberg!), begins. It's a fascinating example of a well-done infodump, even as it breaks the "rules". The first sentence is an implied first half of a contrary-to-fact conditional statement! It tells you exactly what this person is like, with plenty of Is statements, and he's not even the protagonist of the story. It hooks me in an instant.
I can't imagine why I've never read anything by Sinclair Lewis before. Read about him in passing, sure, but nothing he actually wrote. I think I will start.