I Read Books: Babbitt

Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel prize for literature, and Babbitt was one of the novels mentioned  in the presentation speech. It’s a satire of 1920s, medium sized city commercialism, business and boosterism. Wikipedia claims ‘The word "Babbitt" entered the English language as a "person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards"’.  Okay then.

George Babbitt is a real estate dealer, and he believes in America and Business and Zip and Hard Work and Getting Ahead. There’s not a great deal of plot; we mostly follow Babbitt as he goes about his life. This is quite funny. A change occurs part way through when his best friend Paul shoots his wife; Babbitt takes to hanging around with a widow and her fast set and has the audacity to believe in such radical opinions as hoping that shooting strikers is unnecessary. Then his wife needs an operation and he fall back into his regular life.

The newness of such things as telephones and cars is notable, as is the fact that, despite Prohibition, everyone is drinking like fish. There’s just a touch of the recent tragedy of WW1 hanging about, mostly unspoken, occasionally coming to the surface.

One of the points of interest to me is that Lewis set this novel (and several others) in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. More than that, he created an entire fictional state, Winnemac (Zenith, though the most populous city of the state, is not the capital, that honour falling to Galop de Vache), that he returned to as the setting of later novels. I love a good fictional place, mostly so that I can steal it and have it be a background location in my own writing. Lewis invented it because his first novel was set in his hometown in Minnesota; not everyone there appreciated his satire on their home. People living in fictional towns don't make such loud complaints in the real world.

Read This: For a quite funny 1920s novel getting into what’s going on in Midwestern cities and the stifling pressure of conformity
Don’t Read This: If you don’t want an amusing meandering almost non-novel.