Babbitt
First editionFirst book publication
1922, United States
Literature form
Novel
Genres
Literary, satire
Writing language
English
Author's country
United States
Length
approx. 124,000 words
Then and now in middling America
A century after its first publication, the story of George Babbitt can elicit reactions of both "This is so dated!" and "Just like today!" And often from the same readers.
Sinclair Lewis's most influential novel, Babbitt, deftly satirizes the middle-class customs, political fashions and cultural artefacts of its time and place—namely the post-Great War years in small-city America. These superficialities have of course changed over time. Political, religious and business trends have come and gone.
But somehow reading this today never seems like an effort to recover lost Americana. The vernacular can sometimes verge on being archaic and some of the social references may be obscure. But Babbitt never seems an exercise in irrelevance. For the target of the book's more sustained satire is the outlook running under and through American society.
Read George Babbitt's address to the Zenith Real Estate Board at the centre of the novel. It's a classic summing up of the all-American attitude then. And note how much of it is still familiar. Expressions may have evolved since then but the old ideas persist. Exaltation of Middle America. Consumerism. Christian values. Implicit racism. Sexism. Disdain for intellectuals, professors, artists and urbanites. Conflation of business and progress. Laissez-faire capitalism. Anti-socialism. Appeals to right-thinking patriotism.
You can practically hear an audience chanting "U.S.A., U.S.A.!" after this speech.
Where 'Average' Americans live
Note also I'm calling the location small-city America. Since the success of his previous novel Main Street, Lewis is often typed as a critic of small-town life. This may lead readers to look down upon Babbitt and his colleagues as unsophisticated bumpkins. But that's far from accurate. Babbitt's fictional home, Zenith, is said to have a population of more than 361,000—making it a medium-sized centre in its day. Potentially surpassed, Babbitt notes, only by the "overgrown" metropolises like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. It's the kind of medium-sized municipalities most North Americans probably live in. In fact, the object of Babbitt's greatest praise as average American citizens are the inhabitants of idealized suburbs of his growing cities.
Because of this novel, "Babbitt" has entered the lexicon to indicate a city dweller, usually a businessperson or professional who blindly promotes middle-class values and hypes the place to attract more residents (in Babbitt's day) or tourism (more often today).
Yet, even as we read Lewis's satirical attack on civic boosterism, we can't help but feel some empathy for Babbitt the booster. We can see he is unaware of how he is being manipulated into playing the role he does in the town without ever being accepted into Zenith's highest echelons of money and power. We understand he's basically a decent man and we have high hopes for his reformation when he goes through a period of rebellion against his once treasured conformity and conservative views.
It also helps that Lewis is one terrific writer. He's nowhere near the great stylists of American writing in the early twentieth century. But he has his own set of talents that make a fiction move, even a middling fiction like Babbitt in which, to be honest, not much of wide significance transpires.
His dramatic framing, his hyperbolic humour, his colourful dialogue, and the nuanced confrontations of his characters keep Babbitt from becoming a dull anti-capitalist tirade. It's an entertaining anti-capitalist tirade.
— Eric
