I took Babbitt with me on a trip earlier this summer because my copy is quite small and lightweight and Sinclair Lewis won the 1930 Nobel Prize for literature, and though it is going slowly, I’m still interested in reading Nobel laureates. Around the 80-page mark, I wasn’t so sure. The main character, George Babbitt, was entertainingly and bitingly written, but the book was getting repetitive. After that point, things started to happen a little more, though the book is never terribly plot-driven. The afterward in my copy of the book says that the book was originally going to be 24 hours in the life of this character, and the first 80 pages felt like maybe that was the goal.
The blurb on the back cover of my copy says, “With his portrait of George F. Babbitt, the conniving, prosperous real-estate man from Zenith, Sinclair Lewis created one of the ugliest, but most convincing, figures in American fiction—the total conformist.” And that kind of seems to sell the character short. Lewis portrays Babbitt as this caricature of a conformist at the beginning of the book, but as the book goes on, he becomes more aware of the emptiness of his conformity and tries to push back on the expectations others have for him as this respectable real estate agent in a generic Midwestern town. He is a deeper character than he seemed at first, and the glimpses of his young idealism help shape that as well. (Though he does retreat back into conformity at the end, I think his treatment of people less conforming than he will be better in the future.)
Babbitt was written in 1922, and Lewis got the Nobel Prize in 1930, right after the start of the Great Depression. It’s interesting to see how this portrayal of the generic American city and amoral businessman does and does not feel familiar today. The language and race relations feel antiquated, but other parts seem like they could have been written in the past few decades.
Babbitt was a huge sensation when it was written. “Babbitt” and “babbitry” became common descriptors for complacency and materialism. In the reading I did before writing this reflection (including this lengthy review), I learned that it was made into two movies, one in 1924 and one in 1934 and that J.R.R. Tolkien was a fan of Lewis and may have chosen the word “hobbit” because of an association with Babbitt. Most of the reading I do is much more recent than 1922, and I’m glad I now know a little bit more about the literary landscape.
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