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Title: Babbitt by Richard Lingeman, Sinclair Lewis ISBN: 0-375-75925-5 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 08 January, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.89 (46 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Hapless salesman in prepostmodern world
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: Peppy All-American Booster Weathers Mid-Life Crisis
Comment: Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Hart Benton, the artist, were about the same age, they both focussed on the American Heartland, and as I read Lewis, I see that they both had something else in common. They both had a tendency to draw cartoonish characters. George F. Babbitt is the main character of a satire by the same name; you might even laugh aloud in some places. Lewis is skillful, but at times, heavy-handed. He has portrayed an average Joe of 1920, the pep- and vim-obsessed go-getting businessman who was the bedrock of our industrial age, hypocritical, materialist, crooked, conformist, even proto-fascist. Babbitt is a real estate agent, a family man surrounded by the wealth of material goods provided by thriving industrial capitalism. He belongs enthusiastically and unquestioningly to any organization dedicated to preserving his and his family's ready access to those goods---professional group (realtors association), Boosters, church, and set social circle. He spouts meaningless platitudes on every subject, knows nothing except the price of real estate and methods of collusion, and ignores his feelings, his family, and the rest of the world, all the while believing that his city, state, and country are the best in the world. The first 90-odd pages of BABBITT are pure genius; one of the best character portraits you are likely to find in American literature---but it is a caricature after all. Lewis' choice of names underlines his cartoonish glee in writing this brilliant novel---Vergil Gunch, Professor Pumphrey, Chet Laylock, Matt Penniman, Muriel Frink, Opal Mudge, Carrie Nork, and Miss McGoun---names that could have been annexed years later by MAD magazine ! "Babbitt" has long been a word in American English, signifying a conforming materialist citizen without a mind of his own. Perhaps this is not entirely fair.
George goes through a mid-life crisis, rebels against his static, materialistic life with its know-nothing attitudes, its moral certitudes, and its boring routines. His closest friend (aren't there certain unspoken overtones of homosexual love ?) commits a dastardly deed, breaking George's heart. "On the rebound", he meets the fantastically-named Tanis Judique, femme fatale à la Midwest. Certain consequences arise, Lewis brings in his ever-present fear of American fascist tendencies, and there's a rather hopeful ending, also in the American tradition. If you are looking for a place to begin reading Sinclair Lewis, BABBITT is an excellent choice. If you already know other Lewis novels, don't miss this one. I would say that with "Main Street", "Elmer Gantry" and "Dodsworth", BABBITT is at the solid gold core of Sinclair Lewis' work. He certainly did deserve that Nobel Prize.
Rating: 2
Summary: The book for which Lewis won the Nobel Prize.
Comment: "Babbitt," published in 1922, was the second straight publishing phenomenon for Sinclair Lewis, who had become a household name in 1920 with "Main Street." By 1930, Lewis had published three more notable novels ("Arrowsmith," "Elmer Gantry," and "Dodsworth"), declined the Pulitzer Prize in a fit of pique, and finally became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 1920s were his prime years, and none of his novels was more renowned than "Babbitt," which merited special recognition from the Swedish Academy when Lewis won the Nobel Prize.
So what is one to make of this novel now? It can be dreadfully dull, and could (indeed should) have been cut in half. It wanders around in search of a plot, and though many of its insights can be funny, overall one has to marvel at how genteel the literature of 1920s was in order to make this book a national sensation.
Basically, it is the story of George F. Babbitt, a solidly Republican, supremely self-satisfied, deeply stupid real estate man, who has a sort of midlife crisis in the course of the novel before returning desperately to his earlier state of censorious complacency by the last chapters. Lewis designed him to be an exemplar of his class, and many thought he was. The term "Babbitt" became a popular way of referring to chubby, materialistic businessmen. And then, by the 1940s, the novel had largely faded into oblivion, except in college classes or high school reading lists.
Why? Quite simply, because it's not a particularly good novel. It is a reasonably well-written slice of satirical social commentary, and little more. Today, it is merely a cultural relic from the twenties, kind of like the abominably bad "Great Gatsby," which dilettantes rave over as if it were actually a good novel. It isn't, and neither is "Babbitt." But for those interested in how America saw itself just before the Great Depression, books like these might be informative.
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Title: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mallon ISBN: 0451526821 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis ISBN: 0451522516 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1978 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: The Grapes of Wrath: John Steinbeck Centennial Edition (1902-2002) by John Steinbeck ISBN: 0142000663 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 03 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, E. L. Doctorow ISBN: 0451526910 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald ISBN: 0684801523 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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