Word: marvinism
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...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...
...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...
...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...
Berger, Bothe, and Amsden led the visitors' offense with 34 points between them, but Jack Clark of the Crimson came off with 13 points and the scoring honors. Coach Stahl's quintet was hampered by the absence of Bob Chapple and Marvin Jenkins...