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A review by ericfheiman
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
3.0
“Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, because he could never run away from himself.”
Oh, George Babbitt. I suppose I shouldn't be too spooked that my current age is exactly the same as our bumbling protagonist in this eponymously-titled novel. Yet I'm guessing that my age is exactly why I'm both repulsed by and sympathetic to our (anti)hero, and see this aspect of the book as its greatest success. I surely don't consider myself as morally rudderless and vacuously bourgeois as Babbitt, but I certainly can relate to his hand-wringing struggles between following his conscience / passions and then his duty to family, his not wanting to rock the boat lest he be cast out of his comfy Zenith eden. And the issues Babbitt wrests with around politics, education and family are still surprisingly applicable today.
But Lewis lays on the satire and Marxist leanings a bit too thick. Babbitt's hypocrisy is funny at first, then gets numbingly repetitive before long. And while the 1920s banter between characters is amusing enough, Lewis's writing is pretty prosaic, stylistically. I longed for a little less ham-fisted critique (even though the insights are wise) and a bit more poetic eloquence.
Oh, George Babbitt. I suppose I shouldn't be too spooked that my current age is exactly the same as our bumbling protagonist in this eponymously-titled novel. Yet I'm guessing that my age is exactly why I'm both repulsed by and sympathetic to our (anti)hero, and see this aspect of the book as its greatest success. I surely don't consider myself as morally rudderless and vacuously bourgeois as Babbitt, but I certainly can relate to his hand-wringing struggles between following his conscience / passions and then his duty to family, his not wanting to rock the boat lest he be cast out of his comfy Zenith eden. And the issues Babbitt wrests with around politics, education and family are still surprisingly applicable today.
But Lewis lays on the satire and Marxist leanings a bit too thick. Babbitt's hypocrisy is funny at first, then gets numbingly repetitive before long. And while the 1920s banter between characters is amusing enough, Lewis's writing is pretty prosaic, stylistically. I longed for a little less ham-fisted critique (even though the insights are wise) and a bit more poetic eloquence.