4.0 out of 5 stars
4.75 Stars -- Another Great Lewis Work, April 25, 2010
This review is from: Babbitt (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Paperback)
1922's Babbitt is one of Sinclair Lewis' best works and one of the best twentieth century American novels, essential for anyone interested in Lewis or the era.
Main Street, Lewis' prior novel and breakthrough, satirizes American small town life and depicts the New Woman; Babbitt satirizes American urban life and depicts the American Everyman. The latter is its best-known and most insightful aspect. The character of Babbitt epitomizes 1920s' middle class values; obsessed with consumerism and money making, he embodies conservatism, Republican politics, and WASP supremacy. In short, Lewis deftly drew the kind of American then growing more common each year - and more importantly, the ideal to which, outwardly at least, more and more people aspired. Babbitt is one of the most vividly drawn and fully lifelike characters I have seen in the hundreds or thousands of books I have read; he not only seems real in himself but the very image of many people I have known. It may be very hard to like him; he is vain, ignorant, narrow-minded, shallow, hypocritical, temperamental, and many other unsavory things. That said, it is almost impossible to hate him; he is truly kind to his friend Paul and has occasional insight as well as admirable if thwarted ambition. Despicable as his thoughts and actions sometimes are, we cannot shake the feeling that he is decent at heart. An early reviewer made the all-important point that few will see themselves in Babbitt, but all will see people they know - probably many. He is the apotheosis of an important American type, perhaps the era's dominant one and still very prominent. More fundamentally, he is essentially human; for all his faults, any honest person will feel with and for him, because his failings and many of his strivings are central to the twentieth/twenty-first century human condition. Nearly everyone in current Western society can sympathize greatly with his doubts and struggles. Babbitt is at times nothing less than loathsome and often risible, yet it is hard to laugh at him, much less anything harsher; he is really more pitiable than anything.
This gets to the book's more important American dream critique. Babbitt is ostensibly successful in a way most Americans would envy yet plagued by uncertainty. He has gone about life unthinkingly for years but is suddenly haunted by dissatisfaction and a dreadful feeling of hollowness. Lewis was ahead of his time in depicting this malaise, which was not generally admitted for decades. He exposes American society as not only superficial but largely artificial, dominated by crass, anti-intellectual commercialism and unthinking conservatism. The novel rigorously condemns capitalism at its worst, vibrantly showing how it dehumanizes and saps culture. Much of this is done via brilliant speech evocation; Lewis was one of the first to use contemporary American speech fictionally, and Babbitt is perhaps its height. H. L. Mencken, author of The American Language, rightly praised it. Lewis had a great ear for slang and uses it with aplomb; one of his key insights is just how thoroughly commercialism had invaded speech. He also invented slang terms, several of which entered popular use, as did "Babbitt" and "Babbitry." This is such an essential part of the work that a glossary was necessary in European editions, and the book did much to make Europeans aware of American slang.
Babbitt also searchingly dramatizes a range of other related and important issues, including masculinity, femininity and feminism (a core Main Street theme), religion (the focus of Lewis' later Elmer Gantry), race, and class. It is often satirical but sometimes ponderously thought-provoking and occasionally tragic. Lewis is typically called a satirist, but this sells him rather short; his range is significantly wider, but even more important is his strong artistic skill. Anyone who likes Main will like this, though the latter's good humor profusion is largely missing, but Lewis' artistry had clearly improved. The episodic plotting that many criticize him for is mostly gone; Babbitt initially seems episodic, but a closer look reveals a very deliberate progression. This is all the more remarkable in that hardly anything really important seems to happen; the book begins with a near hour-to-hour account of Babbitt's everyday life and continues focusing on apparent minutia. However, these small events are more meaningful in retrospect and form an important whole. The primary improvement over Main is that the ending is not arbitrary but extremely deliberate and indeed, given the writing's steady march, all but inevitable in the best artistic sense. It is also unusually hopeful for Lewis, suggesting that, however savage his critiques, he believed things might change for the better.
This sadly has not occurred; Babbittry has grown ever more pervasive. The novel was written at an important time in American history - between World War I and the economic boom preceding the Great Depression. All this shows up; WWI is hardly mentioned openly but looms like a ghastly demon, fueling dissatisfaction and insecurity. Lewis memorably dramatizes the poor economy's effects: labor unrest, growing radicalism, emboldened reactionaries, etc. The Jazz Age decadence famously chronicled by contemporaries like Fitzgerald and Hemingway is also on display. It was a dark period, and Lewis chronicles brilliantly; his realism and attention to detail ensure that one can learn more about the era here than in any history book. We not only see what daily lives were like but absorb much about a wide variety of subjects: politics, speech, gender roles, sexuality, fashion, music, cinema, economics, and practically everything else. Perhaps most revealing is a candid picture of Prohibition era drinking. The book answered several questions I had always had and taught me much.
The fact that Babbitt so completely embodies its era unsurprisingly led to a decline in its and Lewis' reputation when the era became a dim memory. However, those who wrote him and it off were unrealistically optimistic. The realization that later prosperity was mostly illusory and the continuing existence of nearly everything the book criticizes make it seem newly relevant. It may indeed be more relevant than ever, but the unfortunate truth is that it has always been relevant. The novel is certainly a timepiece in many ways, giving it great historical value, but several core themes - not least its conformity send up - are eternal, and its depiction of existential unease is central to the present human condition. We were unwise to write Babbitt off and must not repeat the mistake; it has much to teach us and is also highly entertaining with much to provoke thought and emotion - an essential early twentieth century American novel.
As for this edition, it is not up to the usual Barnes & Noble Classics standard. It has the usual wealth of supplemental material: an Introduction with background on Lewis and the novel plus some critical analysis; notes; a short biography; a timeline; a description of works inspired by Lewis; a list of comments and questions; a bibliography; and opening quotes. Some of this is always superfluous, but especially so here. For example, the Introduction is very substandard, not least because it almost immediately summarizes Lewis' biography; between it, the timeline, and the bio section, we get the same story in almost the same words within a few pages! It also has a worthless, excessively detailed plot summary. Perhaps even more damning, there is almost no analysis or insight; the Introduction inexplicably sticks to the obvious and relies too heavily on quotes. It is also easy to criticize the notes, though they are thankfully footnotes instead of the endnotes the series usually has; they are arguably too few, and the ones we get often belabor the obvious and are possibly inaccurate. The comments section is also inadequate; it claims to have material from a variety of sources over a period of time but consists almost entirely of initial reviews. Anyone wanting useful supplemental material should thus look elsewhere, which may be a good idea for anyone wanting more about the important historical context, though Babbitt more than stands on its own.
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