Shelf life: Looking at secular books

BABBITT
By Sinclair Lewis
BiblioBazaar. 344 pages. (Dover Thrift edition, £3.50 via Amazon — it can also be read free online)
ISBN 978-1-426406072

This is not a new book, but, until a friend enthused about it, I had never heard of it or its author. Perhaps that’s to my shame; Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt in 1922, and a few years after was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature.

Then again this is an American book, a satire on the complacency and hypocrisy of American middle class life after the First World War and, as such, its reputation maybe has stayed the other side of the Atlantic.

Shallow life

George Babbitt is a self-made man, a confident, well-respected member of a well-regarded suburb, Floral Heights, which has just the right d?cor and location. We meet him, in part one, on a typical day in his well-ordered life. Lewis mercilessly highlights the aspirational materialism of ‘Zenith’, Babbitt’s town, where possessions form identity and mask all manner of insecurities. Babbitt is woken by ‘the best of nationally advertised and quantitavely [sic] produced alarm clocks’, a fact which brings him great pride and confidence. As he progresses through his day we see the beginning of a frustration with this shallow and ultimately deceitful life, which will provide the structure of the next two parts of the book.

The writing throughout the novel takes some getting used to. At times it is beautifully poised, with accurate dialogue and description — Babbitt ‘made nothing in particular, neither butter, nor shoes nor poetry but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.’, but often Sinclair seems to over reach himself and lose sense in his profusion of words. It is a long book too, and the middle section can appear to drag, as Babbitt slowly comes to the decision to rebel against social climbing and moral hypocrisy.

Middle-class deceit

In the last section Lewis regains momentum and we see Babbitt embark upon an affair, take a stand against the barbaric conservatism of his set and throw his lot in with a prohibition breaking set. Lewis’s satire now is turned against the pleasure seekers of the time, whose heads are as empty as those who look down upon them. And in the end? Babbitt’s return to conformity is genuinely credible and provocative. He is a man who has seen the deceit of middle class existence and returns to it to protect those he loves; he has found no resources, and ultimately no real reason, save his stifled conscience, to stand against injustice and emptiness.

Satisfying read

Though this is not an easy read it is a satisfying one; Babbitt’s world is not far from our world in many ways, and Babbitt’s dilemma is in the hearts of many of those around us. How sad to read about Sinclair Lewis himself, who, though he could diagnose and describe the emptiness of life, found no cure and died a lonely, alcoholic death. Babbitt provokes readers to question how conformist we are, and how self-serving we can be; but Christians know a saviour who is genuinely counter-cultural; Jesus can change us and use us to change his world.

Sarah Allen