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This is a love/hate thing. In Sinclair Lewis’s previous novel Main Street there is more love than hate and in Babbitt it’s the other way round. He does hate George Babbitt for all his boorishness, his complacency, his wretched kneejerk reactionary rightwing politics, his pallid marriage, his blaring friends, his ridiculous slang, his stupid stupidity, but by the end, by the time George has been pulled through a couple of hedges backwards, you can see he loves him a bit too.

This novel is about two things �� the horribleness of American material acquisitive claustrophobic class-ridden unfettered capitalist life and George Babbitt’s miserable crisis at age 46 and how he goes off the rails and gets back on them.

A REGULAR GUY

Of a decent man in Zenith it was required that he should belong to one, preferably two or three, of the innumerable “lodges�� and prosperity-boosting lunch-clubs : to the Rotarians, the Kiwanis, or the Boosters; to the odd Fellows, Moose, Masons, Red Men, Woodmen, Owls, Eagles, Maccabees, Knights of Pythias�� It was the thing to do.

This novel features several frankly overdetailed satirical descriptions of these hearty braying get-togethers. As we wend our way to the middle of the novel we have still not detected much of a plot, just a whole lot of fun being made of old George. Eventually it dawns on him : he isn’t happy.

We are not short of tales of drab regular guys trying to bust out of their straightjacketed lives :

Pennies from Heaven by Dennis Potter
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The movie American Beauty

And Updike, Ford, Roth, on and on. Guys love this stuff! Babbitt is Mr Midlife Crisis 1921.

Sinclair Lewis loves to tell us just how sad George’s life has been, in spite of all his hectic capering jolly boosterism :

In twenty-three years of married life he had peered uneasily at every graceful ankle, every soft shoulder; in thought he had treasured them; but not once had he hazarded respectability by adventuring.

The grim realities are summed up in this devastating sentence about his wife :

For years she had been bored by anything more affectionate than a farewell kiss, and yet she was hurt by any slackening in his irritable periodic interest

Now that’s a gut punch for you. “Irritable”�� brilliant!

HOW GEORGE GOT MARRIED

It happened by accident. He palled around with this fellow student.

Of love there was no talk between them��. And Myra was distinctly a Nice Girl �� one didn’t kiss her, one didn’t “think about her that way at all�� unless one was going to marry her. But she was a dependable companion��

And he find out to his horror that she assumes they are engaged! And he doesn’t have the heart to say they aren’t or that he doesn’t love her. How horrible!

WHAT FUN

Sinclair Lewis can zing some devastating lines when you aren’t expecting it :

He accepted Overbrook’s next plaintive invitation, for an evening two weeks off. A dinner two weeks off, even a family dinner, never seems so appalling, till the two weeks have astoundingly disappeared and one comes dismayed to the ambushed hour.

He wandered home and found his wife radiant with the horrified interest we have in the tragedies of our friends.

TWO THINGS ABOUT THE 1920S

They thought drunk driving was not a problem.

With his other faculties blurred he yet had the motorist’s gift of being able to drive when he could scarcely walk

And��. They had young female manicurists working in men’s barber parlors. I thought that was strange. So guys had their nails done after they had a shave & haircut. I don’t think guys do that anymore.

TWO THINGS SINCLAIR LEWIS DID NOT TELL ME

When old George Babbitt does find himself a lady friend, I could not figure if we were supposed to assume the relationship was merely platonic (a lot of drinking and dancing, a little bit of kissing) or something more. I was frustrated! Tell me, Sinclair!

And �� all these white middle class types loved jazz and cocked a snook at “longhaired�� music (classical!). But were they listening to Fletcher Henderson or Paul Whiteman �� the black originals or the white ripoff merchants? The musicologist in me wanted to know.

GEORGE’S EPIPHANY

It was coming to him that perhaps all life as he knew it and vigorously practiced it was futile; that heaven…was neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn’t much pleasure out of making money; that it was of doubtful worth to rear children merely that they might rear children who would rear children.

THE WRAP UP

Sinclair Lewis wrote four Big Ones �� Main Street (it exhausted me but I finally did love it), Babbitt, Elmer Gantry (I saw the movie �� what a brilliant performance by Burt Lancaster) and It Can’t Happen Here (about a fascist takeover of the USA �� sounds interesting). Well, that’s four more big ones than a lot of novelists I could think of. In the end, although Babbitt was a pain in the neck a lot of the time, and there was way too much laughing-at-the-zoo-animals about it, I ended up finding just enough compassion in it for a final four stars. But I’m not sure I’m recommending it to you goodreaders. I don’t think you’d come back and thank me.