Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

BABBITT by Sinclair Lewis

I was in a teeny-tiny used bookstore near the end of this summer in Oldtowne Alexandria, Virginia, poking through tight tall stacks of dusty paperbacks with a neck aching from reading titles sideways and a paper cup of stale Starbucks in my left hand WHEN I came across this little fella. I recalled my sagacious Latin teacher, who already mandates his students read something worthwhile over the summer proffering this particular novel as a darn good one, funny, dark, and engaging.

Which is, more or less, what Babbitt proved to be. If you are familiar with Hopper's work (which, if you have been a faithful reader of this blog, you ought to be!) the cover painting picked out by Dover Thrift Editions is understandably appropriate for the gloomy, restless atmosphere of the story, the cardboardy characters, and the early American everytown setting. It is no coincidence that my own edition, the Bantam Classic, also sported a Hopper picture on its front.

George Babbitt, the protagonist and titular character of Lewis's novel, is one of those treasured characters in literature that is simultaneously wholesomely lovable and completely odious. His reasoning is so humanly real, and therefore so compelling, that we readers find ourselves miffed, ambitious, embarrassed and enraged right along with him. Besides being dangerously easy to identify with, he incessantly hypocritical.

By those two factors I developed the notion that George Babbitt bears a resemblance to a possible conception of a grown up Holden Caulfield. If any of you kids have ever read Catcher In The Rye, you might have experienced Phase One of the Catcher-Effect ("I am just like Holden Caulfield! I hate phonies!")... and if you're lucky, you may be within Phase Two ("Oooohh wait, I get it. The whole point was the Holden is ALSO a facetious phony, and is therefore the greatest hypocrite of all").

Babbitt is a long novel in which nothing really happens (which is typically my favorite kind). It is an environmental study masquerading as a character study. The themes are not difficult to decipher; the hypocrisy, conformity and standardization of American life in the early 20th century blare sirenlike in each of its bazillion chapters. What made it a particularly interesting experience for me was that I read it a few weeks after I read the collected short works of Fitzgerald, who shares with Lewis the roaring age of flappers and prohibition. Babbitt balances out the depressing layers with frequent jokes and gags, however dark, while Fitzgerald's relief comes largely from a rotation between comic stories and truly black ones.

I give it 4.5/5 Uricons