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I can't stop talking about Babbitt, which I finally read a few weeks ago and am now selling door-to-door like magic vitamins; I'm like Tom Cruise endorsing Scientology, but pushier. Here's a great take on the book from one of my all-around heroes, former Nation colleague Richard Lingeman. This is from a Sinclair Lewis Society interview with Richard about his fantastic biography Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street:
Babbitt is still my favorite. It achieves such a deft balance between realism and satire. It is funny in places. It evokes with accuracy and hardly a whiff of didacticism, the politics and power and the social anatomy of a typical American city, as well as the leading institutions, such as business and religion, and the Chamber of Commerce booming and the competitiveness, and the petty corruption and the power structure—the real rulers who pull the strings behind the scenes. And Lewis limns a brilliant almost tactile and surreal portrait of the central character's environment, the "thingification" of his life, the tinny gadgets, consumerism, advertising and PR oppress him. I sometimes wonder if T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land influenced him. Has America changed that much since 1922?
A Map of Sinclair Lewis' United States as It Appears in His Novels [Language of the Land]
Comments
Em: What a coincidence. Last week I came across a photo of Lewis and his second wife (Dorothy Thompson) with Franklin P. Adams from the Algonquin Round Table. I gotta read some Lewis now!Keep up the great work with your blog.
I’m a Sinclair Lewis fan of long standing. I read Main Street first (have you read that?), as a young and not-so-happily-married woman—made a big impact. Later Babbitt and Dodsworth, and some others I didn’t like as well. They’re books that take on big ideas, but are down-to-earth at the same time.