Babbitt

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: 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: 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: What's to like?
Review: I don't understand why anyone would like this book. It was boaring and had to much of Babbit's everyday life. Sinclair Lewis spent pages on frivolis information. There was no plot to the story and the book went on forever. If this book is on your school reading list Pick another to read.

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: shockingly modern
Review: I was surprised to learn that what I think of as modern-day american culture existed in the 1920's. Girls sulk in sweatsuits. Couples divorce. Mid-life crises strike at 46. Teenage siblings argue over car keys. Unmuddied by old-timey-ness, the writing is clear and present from the first page.

Crochety old Babbitt (the title character) worships business, technology, and practical knowhow, but trembles daily with a vague dissatisfaction. A precursor to Revolutionary Road, Rabbit, Run, Independence Day, Preston Falls, and American Beauty, Babbit describes a middle-aged man undermined by his prosperity, teenage children, and his digestion.

Babbit burns away any nostalgia we might have of the '20s as part of an earlier time where faith staved off anxiety, civility reigned, or the world was any less immoral. Written during the period it describes, Babbitt reveals a basic american character and how little progress we have made

Rating:
Summary: A Lot of Hilarious Shilly-Shallying, Flip-Flopping and Fun
Review: If you ask me. And I mean it, I mean, I really mean it. I mean, the people in this book are, well, as peppy and interesting as any folks can ever be, know what I mean? I liked the dinner party parts and the ladies' looking alike and the gentlemen not looking alike until you got to know 'em and then you realized it was the reverse. The men all acted just about the same, know what I mean? Always repeating themselves and acting like they were the Big Cheese and such. Also, it was quite a bit of amusement hearing about Prohibition, what it was really like, if you get my meaning. How people in the Big Little Cities like Zenith defended it but in private couldn't wait to get their hands on a bottle of gin and go on about their Rights and Liberties, by golly, and how nobody had the right to tell them what to do in their own homes and in America and such. Hypocrisy. Boosterism. Crony-ism. Now, those were the days. (They're still the days.)

Rating:
Summary: The Best Satire
Review: If you have no respect for hollow persons hungry on power, money, image, in a word conformity, then have them read this. Surely you know a person as such. Simply have them read this. It utterly stultifies conformists and demands of one not to be one.Here, with Sinclair Lewis, there is impressive detail and perhaps more anger then I can say. The man is George F. Babbitt, 46-year old middle-class realtor, immature, greedy, mean, arrogant, silly, unable to think for himself. To put it simply, he has no meaning in his life, nothing to live for. He puts up appearances, exagerates the truth, eats too much, drinks, bullies, shows off. Conformist, hypocrite.

There is no real plot, rather a day-in-the-life-of situation, presenting I would argue a sold believable character. I felt I had met Babbitt hundreds of times before. He even appeared briefly in a dream or two of mine, so real was he in the book. Having read this book I came to resent Capitalism deeply. And yet this book is not merely about provincial politics, it has to do with the hollow living of many people who hold capricious beliefs. The style of the book is, I feel, original, since few authors have the audacity of Lewis to apply capitalism to nearly every paragraph ("It was a master-piece among bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes.") Beware, however, this novel has enough detail to entail a longer than necessary read. If Babbit himself were to read it, he would not last through the opening chapter, and that, there, is the sad paradox of what Lewis was trying to express.

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: A Man and the City
Review: Lewis was an enormously successful writer in the 1920s (really on the same level as Hemmingway and Fitzgerald), but he has faded and is hardly read today. This, however, has no bearing on the importance of his writing. His writings reveal the social realities and concerns of his time. He focuses on individuals not communities (not bound together in any organic way). He is also skeptical about success and the American dream. There is a real sense of contempt toward the middle-class in Lewis. He really fills in a gap in The Great Gatsby, which included old money, new money, and the working class, but where is the middle class. As a result, Lewis' is famous for satirizing the middle class.
Lewis wrote Babbitt in 1922, and based it on sociological research in Midwestern cities. He spent months simply observing. A little backgroud information: first, George F. Babbitt is a real-estate agent and land has become a commodity in the 1920s. Second, the reader presumes Babbitt to have been a progressive in his younger years since his son is named Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt. Third, Babbitt is going through a midlife crisis. Lewis offers a satirical view of Middle American life. Lewis is closely attuned to the nuances of social classes. Within the middle class Lewis teases out differences in rank (lower-middle and upper-middle). He examines social conformity and the pressures of the group on behavior. Lewis also observes the new mass culture and the automobile's impact.
Also adding to the success and interest of Babbitt is the fact that Babit can be read as an authentic, fully developed character throughout the novel. Babbitt is a success but he has a tremendous feeling of longing for things not accomplished due to social reality. Babbitt is a conservative, but quite amazingly he becomes involved in a socialist's campaign. His character is transforming. He even joins a bohemian circle (Lewis offers a description for the counter-culture). He realizes that there are social conformities that exist in this small group of Bohemians as well as in "normal" middle class.
Lewis also turns away from the city and towards the wilderness. This encounter with nature represents that chance of reenergizing or rejuvenating. Babbitt goes to a fishing camp where Joe Paradise is the guide. But Babbitt realizes that there are no more canoes. Instead they have been replaced with motor boats. However, there are still no cities or stores. Joe tells Babbitt that he would move to the city and open a store if he had the money to do so. This is a pivotal point in Lewis' story. Joe Paradise wants the life that Babbitt has and finds so frustrating. Babbitt realizes that he is shaped by the city.
The one real change that Babbitt makes in his life occur is in the realm of family intimacy. His marriage is dead in the beginning of the book, but his wife has a medical emergency. It is in that situation that Babit rediscovers his love for his wife. It also confirms Babbitt's entrapment. In order to have this intimacy Babbitt has to accept the conformities of the city life.
Babbitt is a tremendously important description of a man and the affect of city life in the new urban America.