Babbitt

Rating:
Summary: Hmmm, have I become a Babbitt?
Review: Much of my reading is non fiction, particularly American history. However, as a history enthusiast, I sometimes like to read American fiction since such literature gives a first hand flavor of cultural history. I read this book many years ago and in rereading this past week, I realize how timeless it is. Since I first read it, I have become a middle aged adult active in local civic organizations. Additionally, I am basically conservative both politically and socially. Thus, this book gives me pause as I wonder, "have I become Babbitt?" I hope not since Babbittism (is that a word?) is a state of mind, not a superficial demographic profile. If you are a Babbitt, you are a self satisfied blowhard, yet are not free of underlying self doubts and insecurities. Such fatuous swellheads come in all political and social stripes.

This novel satirizes the conservative, semi ignorant, civic minded business person but, there is a much more subtle satire running through the book. At one point, Babbitt fancies himself as "broad minded and liberal." For a time, he starts to run around with a different sort of crowd. Although this particular satire doesn't hit you up side the head, if you read carefully, the trendy liberals of that time (1920s) are also satirized.

Ultimately, this book is about the power of conformity. When this book was written, the author saw it as a nearly irresistable force. His examination of this issue may well be relevant today.

Rating:
Summary: misunderstood?
Review: Odd, isn't it, that George F. Babbitt should be one of the most reviled characters in American literature? What, after all, is his great crime ? It's not that he's a conformist; we're all conformists of one kind or another; such is the nature of social creatures. No, the problem with George Babbitt, that which has so incensed intellectuals for some eighty-odd years is the set of ideas that he conforms to : Middle American ideals--hard work, thrift, salesmanship, conservatism, Christianity, family values, monogamy, the whole panoply of traditional morays of which the Left is so contemptuous.

George's story is fairly simple. A successful Realtor in the booming midwestern city of Zenith, married with three children, George is a pillar of the community and a support to his family, but he's not happy. Everyone is always coming to him with their complaints about life, but he's never supposed to question his lot. Then his friend, Paul Riesling, begins to express his own dissatisfaction and together the two begin to sow some wild oats. George goes along on a trip to Maine without their wives, but eventually Paul sprints ahead by first having an affair and then shooting his wife.

George, who had tried reigning Paul in, now proceeds to have his own affair with the widow Tanis Judique. He also starts to hang out with some of Tanis's scruffy friends and to vocally question the received wisdom of Zenith's business community. But George's wife, Myra, finds out about the affair and George's business partners bail out on a few deals. Meanwhile, George discovers that Tanis, though her life seemed freer at first, is just as bound by societal conventions as he.

With his own business now suffering and the bloom off of his new romance, George is already beginning to waiver, and when Myra comes down with a potentially deadly case of appendicitis, he realizes that he wants his old life back. Myra and his friends welcome him back to the fold.

In a final scene, George's son elopes, and he surprises everyone by accepting the marriage. He even tells the boy that he should seize his opportunities now, because he (George) never truly did anything he wanted to his whole life.

Now I understand that on the surface this does seem like an indictment of middle America, but it also reads like a cautionary tale, defending Zenith and its citizens from the notion that they'd be happier if they rebelled. In fact, the most convincing and moving moments in the whole book come when George returns to Myra.

Likewise, perhaps the truest and certainly the funniest social criticism in the book is aimed not at the good people of Zenith, but at those who would change them. When The Reverend Mike Monday, who might easily be nothing but a caricature of a huckster preacher, comes to town.

Sure, Lewis may have thought this was so over-the-top as to preclude the reader paying any heed to the message, or he may have meant it as nothing more than self-deprecating humor, but isn't it at least possible that he suspected we'd prefer this kind of muscular Christianity to the offerings of the lemon-sucking professors, maybe even that he himself preferred it ? If Monday is supposed to be one of the bad guys, ask yourself this, outside of Richard III, when's the last time you recall the bad guy getting such funny lines at the expense of the good guys ?

At any rate, however Lewis intended us to take the story of George Babbitt and his abortive rebellion, the past eighty years have certainly vindicated the morality, even the hypocrisy, of Zenith and its most famous resident. George Babbitt is really one of the heroes of American Literature, all the more so because he chafes at the tugging of the reins but keeps pulling the wagon. Of such sacrifices are great nations and great cultures made.

GRADE : A

Rating:
Summary: Hapless salesman in prepostmodern world
Review: Sinclair Lewis wrote many novels about flawed, non-heroic, Americans living in the midwestern heartland of the 1920s.
This one is about George Babbit, a real estate broker living in the up-and-coming city of Zenith. Babbit is a community booster, civic club member, and proud family man. He has an electric cigar lighter in his car and a fashionable sleeping porch on his house. Just the sort of citizen beloved by the Chamber of Commerce.
After describing the details of George's happy, respectable, and utterly unexamined existence, Lewis throws wrenches into the works. An old friend goes off-kilter. Bored by evenings at home with his rather bland wife, George starts hanging out with a fast and loose crowd. He tries out "liberal ideas" in the way that he might try out a new suit, and flirts with the idea of dumping his suburban existence and living in the woods.
George comes off as a hapless boob, vaguely aware that things are terribly wrong with his life and society but unable to effectively deal with them.
Some of the issues Lewis addresses are a bit dated, but _Babbit_ remains an interesting look at American society. Of note is the cringe-inducing lot of married women, and the lost world of railway travel.

Rating:
Summary: Like Jello after Sorbet-Post Main Street Blues
Review: I am not saying that Babbitt is unreadable, or even a discredit to Lewis in relation to his other work. This was my first Lewis novel: A cynosure, a statement by the man who, with touches of Flaubert and Anderson, crafted painstaking and rewarding satires rife with conformists and cavaliers, and the boredom and outrage experienced by outcasts in small towns and mid-sized cities alike. I read Babbitt a few years ago, and found it a delight to the last.

But it isn't Main Street, the book that helped to gel my admiration of Lewis' craftsmanship. This is why I suggested that first time readers sound Lewis' art by trying out the earlier book before Babbitt. It seems that those aspects that set Main Street like a needle in the eye of small town sameness and malaise: Incisive satire, wit and a mirthfulness that often counteract the more melancholy stretches; and a beautiful troupe of dissatisfied outcasts (Guy Pollock, the bachelor attorney; Miles Bjornstam, itinerant Swedish horse trader turned semi-settled by marriage; Erik Valborg, a tailor with a poetic bent who mispronounces words and runs off to Chicago to star in cheap pictures), are all overstated in Babbitt. There are some surprises: Paul shooting Zeena, George's affair with Tanis Judique, and Ted's elopement with Eunice Littlefield. But, overemphasis on George's hypocritical stance on liquor and his overconsumption of the same, as well as lengthy passages explaining the efforts George undertakes to quit smoking before unceremoniously lighting up again, put lead in the shoes of the story. However, this is still a great book, with some startling prose to its credit. Just give Main Street a glance before you give this a shot.

Rating:
Summary: Attempted Return To Innocence
Review: This certainly is a wonderful creation. Lewis recognized the jumbled priorities of Americans in the early twentieth century. Out of this relization, which became more obvious and blatant the more he considered it, he created Babbit. He designed this character to show that financial success is worthless. In the capitalistic haven of America, financial success is pushed to the forefront of our hopes and expectations. At the same time, Man is endowed with a yearning to return to nature, to innocence. Babbit heroicly attempts such a return. Lewis also sends us a message similar to Thoreau's. He questions the neccesities of life and reasons for our tempestuous need to complicate them. As a bonus, the pages are riddled with wit and humor. I heartily recomend this novel.

Rating:
Summary: Timeless
Review: Initially I put this down years ago, unable to finish it, but later picked up again, and from page 200 on, this novel takes off.

The plot is essentially about a middle manager in his 50s who has a midlife crisis and goes on a binge with bohemians. Sinclair takes his time in blowing up all the details of Babbit's alleged extra-marrital affair and its consequences. (I won't tell you if he really does--you have to read it).

This novel comes alive through intelligent dialogue, an ever-moving story-line that stays in real-time (what Updike later drew on with his own brand of super-realism), with a deep and satisfying examination of the ever-shifting and garrelous Babbit, husband and father of two, who safeguards his modest material success in the fictional town of "Zenith."

Multi-layered, with keen observations of American consumerism, with a hard look at marriage, spirituality, business, fatherhood and mid-life crisis.

Written in 1922, the subject matter is universal and timeless. This book has laid the groundwork for many other novels that portray the American business man: Updike's "Rabbit" series, for one, (who he quotes from Babbit in the opening of "Rabbit Run"), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the Organization Man and others.

I'm glad I returned to this book, and recommend it to anyone frustrated by the often shallow and dehumanizing world of business. Keep a coffee at your side, though.

Rating:
Summary: Good read, but protagonist is a straw man
Review: I came across an editorial recently referring to a "Babbit-type" person and decided it was time to read this book. It was a good read. At times I laughed aloud. There were passages I was tempted to memorize for quoting. I did care what happened to Babbit.

But I'd like to alert young readers that despite Lewis' efforts to make Babbit sympathetic, he is a charicature. In my mid-forties, I've known many businessmen, seen many unexamined lives and mid-life crises. Even 80 years after Babbit was written (when conformity is less in vogue in the US) I've known many conformists.

I haven't known anyone like Babbit. It is out of character for a people person like Babbit to be *so* fond of Paul and yet blind to Paul's needs. It is out of character for him to be so protective of Paul and yet so estranged from his own children.

Enjoy the book and let it remind you to think for yourself and to be real, but don't let it convince you that businessmen are doomed to conformity and to sacrifice of all their ideals. To be good at business is to weild power and though we don't see it ni "Babbit", that power can be used for good. Babbit is almost as much a charicature as are Ayn Rand's businessmen heroes.

Incidentally, as good as this was, I thought Lewis' "Arrowsmith" was better.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible Book
Review: I was forced to read this book for my History course last year. It was supposed to give us insight into the 1920's era. It just made me bored. There was no plot that made me even the slight bit interested in what was to come or in any of the characters. The entire world in Babbit was made up of a bunch of conformists who wasted their lives. If you want a story about not conforming and without a plot, read Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Though too long and absurd, it was at least funny at points. For any students who are forced to read this book, get the cliff notes if you can.

Rating:
Summary: Unmasking Bourgeois Lies
Review: This is a wonderful book. It gives you a hero you care about, and you can understand. Babbitt embodies the aspirations of the rising 1920's middle class. This book is funny and yet so very sad. It is yet another story of a man who is shaken up and woken from his bland life and hollow illusions. Like many similar characters, he is too constrained by societal fetters to follow through with his spiritual revolution. However, he sparks he gets a taste of rebellion. In a real world, the rebellious protagonists engage our imagination but are brought back down to earth by their want of complete freedom and courage. That is why we are mere humans. Lewis reminds us of this. And yet, you cannot help but admire the ambition towars truth.

Rating:
Summary: A Nice Taste of the Roaring Twenties
Review: Recently I read two good non-fiction books about 1920s America: The Uncertainty of Everyday Life (Harvey Green), and Only Yesterday (Frederick L. Allen). Both of these books mentioned Sinclair Lewis' novel Babbitt, so I thought I'd check it out.

After the introduction to this period I got from the above-mentioned histories, I found Babbitt to be a nice companion piece and a good continuation of my study of Roaring 20s America.

Written in 1922 and set in 1920, this novel gives what I think is a good picture of USA in that time. True, Lewis' own prejudices against the upper middle class businessman of his era shine through. But I think the cultural insights we see in the novel are quite accurate. We can take the Babbitt's and their friends as typical representatives of their time and social class --- we see their "typical" day, their "typical" vacations, pasttimes, and activities. Even the colloquialisms are interesting; I can see how they can become annoying after a while, but they do add a reality to the story.

I recommend Babbitt, the other two books I mentioned, and perhaps Edward Behr's book Prohibition as a package for the ambitious amateur historian who seeks to understand what life in our grand parents' and great grand parents' America was like. I think if you get through all four you'll have a pretty good idea of what things were like in that time period.