Customer Reviews

Babbit (Spanish Language Edition)

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This certainly is a wonderful creation. Lewis recognized the jumbled priorities of Americans in the early twentieth century. Out of this relization, which became more obvious and blatant the more he considered it, he created Babbit. He designed this character to show that financial success is worthless. In the capitalistic haven of America, financial success is pushed to the forefront of our hopes and expectations. At the same time, Man is endowed with a yearning to return to nature, to innocence. Babbit heroicly attempts such a return. Lewis also sends us a message similar to Thoreau's. He questions the neccesities of life and reasons for our tempestuous need to complicate them. As a bonus, the pages are riddled with wit and humor. I heartily recomend this novel.

Sinclair Lewis wrote many novels about flawed, non-heroic, Americans living in the midwestern heartland of the 1920s.
This one is about George Babbit, a real estate broker living in the up-and-coming city of Zenith. Babbit is a community booster, civic club member, and proud family man. He has an electric cigar lighter in his car and a fashionable sleeping porch on his house. Just the sort of citizen beloved by the Chamber of Commerce.
After describing the details of George's happy, respectable, and utterly unexamined existence, Lewis throws wrenches into the works. An old friend goes off-kilter. Bored by evenings at home with his rather bland wife, George starts hanging out with a fast and loose crowd. He tries out "liberal ideas" in the way that he might try out a new suit, and flirts with the idea of dumping his suburban existence and living in the woods.
George comes off as a hapless boob, vaguely aware that things are terribly wrong with his life and society but unable to effectively deal with them.
Some of the issues Lewis addresses are a bit dated, but _Babbit_ remains an interesting look at American society. Of note is the cringe-inducing lot of married women, and the lost world of railway travel.

Initially I put this down years ago, unable to finish it, but later picked up again, and from page 200 on, this novel takes off.

The plot is essentially about a middle manager in his 50s who has a midlife crisis and goes on a binge with bohemians. Sinclair takes his time in blowing up all the details of Babbit's alleged extra-marrital affair and its consequences. (I won't tell you if he really does--you have to read it).

This novel comes alive through intelligent dialogue, an ever-moving story-line that stays in real-time (what Updike later drew on with his own brand of super-realism), with a deep and satisfying examination of the ever-shifting and garrelous Babbit, husband and father of two, who safeguards his modest material success in the fictional town of "Zenith."

Multi-layered, with keen observations of American consumerism, with a hard look at marriage, spirituality, business, fatherhood and mid-life crisis.

Written in 1922, the subject matter is universal and timeless. This book has laid the groundwork for many other novels that portray the American business man: Updike's "Rabbit" series, for one, (who he quotes from Babbit in the opening of "Rabbit Run"), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the Organization Man and others.

I'm glad I returned to this book, and recommend it to anyone frustrated by the often shallow and dehumanizing world of business. Keep a coffee at your side, though.

This classic by Sinclair Lewis is set sometime in the early 1900s (1920s ?). It was written to show the shallowness of life of the average, middle-class men of the day in their pursuit for money, popularity, etc.

I found this book to be incredibly long and boring, but I think that was part of the point. At any rate, it's a classic, and in the words of a great literary critic, "These works are no longer on trial - the readers are."