There are two general approaches which Sinclair makes in [his] novels. One is a close, documented study of the working of some specific economic mechanism; the other is a charge of general conspiracy for the maintenance and extension of privilege on the part of the beneficiaries of the system. The Jungle is relatively successful because it leans heavily on the former technique, though the charge of conspiracy is implicit throughout. The later novels are much more flabby and give the reader a sickening sense of the injustices of the economic system only when they fall back on the straight reportorial method.
Most ambitious of Sinclair's social chronicles is the monster work which occupied him throughout the 1940's, the so-called Lanny Budd series. There are eleven volumes in this series…. (Actually the publication of the tenth in 1949 rounded out the series in its original conception. The Return of Lanny Budd four years later is outside the logical and aesthetic unity of the work and will largely be ignored in the discussion that follows.) These volumes constitute a fictional history of our era comparable to Zola's Rougon-Macquart or Romains' Men of Good Will, though they are inferior as fiction to either of these. What the author has here undertaken is to explain our times to those who, living in them, suffer from the double blinders of proximity and acceptance of capitalism as the only form of society. His story is cast in the form of a morality play, with the forces of good pitted against the forces of evil. It is a curious dialectic which he has contrived and the effect is not precisely what his doctrinal purpose should have achieved. For, while the forces of good as represented in the hero, Lanny Budd, win all the local engagements, the war goes on without sensible diminution in the strength of the adversary, since as the Nazi-Fascist enemy is destroyed, the Stalinist monster takes its place, and the battle for a better world is still to win. There is even at the end a tacit admission that in this fight there is little that avails the man of good will, who is notable more for his continued struggle against odds than for the resounding victories that he wins. (pp. 135-36)
