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A review by duffypratt
Babbit by Sinclair Lewis
4.0
I rarely change my mind about a book based on the way it ends. With this book, I make an exception. I went through various phases with this book.
To start, it seemed like a fun satire of one of the most shallow characters imaginable. George Babbit is a real estate man, utterly conventional, and without a thought or opinion of his own. He defines himself by the products he buys. He doesn't know what to think about something unless he's read the opinion in the editorials (conservative, of course). His chief concerns in life are fitting in and doing business, and that's about it. No hobbies. A drab family life with a wife he has never loved.
Then I started to bog down and rather dislike the book. It was clear that Lewis hated all of his characters. It also seemed clear that he considered himself far superior to any of these boorish mid-Westerners. And he was pouring it on so hard. I couldn't see the point of it, or rather, I saw the point all too clearly, and I didn't get why he was going on and on. Worse, I had a suspicion that Lewis did not understand these characters all that well, and that's why the satire was so broad. Of course, there were Babbit's little doubts about his life, but these seemed always to extinguish themselves, and seemed largely to show that Babbit was a hypocrite on top of everything else.
Then, the book changed and I realized that Lewis was writing about mid-life crisis before anyone invented the term. George goes through a bunch of changes in search of his lost youth. And at this point I thought the book was OK, and still had some fun moments. But here, his dissipation was altogether conventional. Instead of defining himself by one set, he started to define himself by another contrary set, and he was still acting as a conformist. But now he was conforming in a way that would lead to his self-destruction. I didn't know how Lewis would resolve it. I could see him destroying this character he seemed to hate from the start. Or I could see him giving up his dissipation and going back to his totally shallow, greedy, conventional life.
And then I found myself liking the resolution. Babbit returns to his conventionality, but it's entirely outward. Along his misadventures, he has grown a conscience and learned how to think for himself. In some ways, I think this story is very much like Pinnochio. Babbitt starts out as a puppet who yearns to be human, and even though he ends up in roughly the same position at the end as when he started, in the process he grows up and gets a soul. In the end, I liked this book very much and thought it better than the other Lewis I've read (Main Street and Elmer Gantry).
To start, it seemed like a fun satire of one of the most shallow characters imaginable. George Babbit is a real estate man, utterly conventional, and without a thought or opinion of his own. He defines himself by the products he buys. He doesn't know what to think about something unless he's read the opinion in the editorials (conservative, of course). His chief concerns in life are fitting in and doing business, and that's about it. No hobbies. A drab family life with a wife he has never loved.
Then I started to bog down and rather dislike the book. It was clear that Lewis hated all of his characters. It also seemed clear that he considered himself far superior to any of these boorish mid-Westerners. And he was pouring it on so hard. I couldn't see the point of it, or rather, I saw the point all too clearly, and I didn't get why he was going on and on. Worse, I had a suspicion that Lewis did not understand these characters all that well, and that's why the satire was so broad. Of course, there were Babbit's little doubts about his life, but these seemed always to extinguish themselves, and seemed largely to show that Babbit was a hypocrite on top of everything else.
Then, the book changed and I realized that Lewis was writing about mid-life crisis before anyone invented the term. George goes through a bunch of changes in search of his lost youth. And at this point I thought the book was OK, and still had some fun moments. But here, his dissipation was altogether conventional. Instead of defining himself by one set, he started to define himself by another contrary set, and he was still acting as a conformist. But now he was conforming in a way that would lead to his self-destruction. I didn't know how Lewis would resolve it. I could see him destroying this character he seemed to hate from the start. Or I could see him giving up his dissipation and going back to his totally shallow, greedy, conventional life.
And then I found myself liking the resolution. Babbit returns to his conventionality, but it's entirely outward. Along his misadventures, he has grown a conscience and learned how to think for himself. In some ways, I think this story is very much like Pinnochio. Babbitt starts out as a puppet who yearns to be human, and even though he ends up in roughly the same position at the end as when he started, in the process he grows up and gets a soul. In the end, I liked this book very much and thought it better than the other Lewis I've read (Main Street and Elmer Gantry).