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Title: Babbitt

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-21-12

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 288 votes

Genres: Classics, American Literature

Publisher's Summary:

On the surface, everything is all right with Babbitts world of the solid, successful businessman. But in reality, George F. Babbitt is a lonely, middle-aged man. He doesnt understand his family, has an unsuccessful attempt at an affair, and is almost financially ruined when he dares to voice sympathy for some striking workers. Babbitt finds that his only safety lies deep in the fold of those who play it safe. He is a man who has added a new word to our language: a Babbitt, meaning someone who conforms unthinkingly, a sheep.

Critic Reviews:

[It is] by its hardness, its efficiency, its compactness that Mr. Lewis work excels. (Virginia Woolf)

Members Reviews:

From a first time Sinclair Lewis listener

Any additional comments?

This book was written and set in the early 1920s but it could have been written yesterday. It is an unflinching and penetrating look at a middle American town and a middle American man, Babbitt. Over the course of the book Babbitt slowly comes to the realization that something is lacking in his life. He doesn't know quite what it is. He is, by the standards of society, successful, mostly honest and upstanding, and yet he feels something is missing. After searching in the common places for meaning and excitement, he realizes that the answers are close at hand, and through his family, particularly his son and daughter, he comes to realize some of what he has been overlooking.

Babbitt could be a poster boy for living an unexamined life, a life lived by the lights cast by society at large as opposed to those emanating from within.

A lovely book well read by Grover Gardner. I was apprehensive about Gardner's narration because the only other book that I have listened to him narrate is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and this novel seemed such a radical departure. I was very pleasantly surprised. His narration was pitch perfect.

Jonathan Franzen, circa 1922

Any additional comments?

For a lot of the time I read this, I found myself thinking of Jonathan Franzen. Is it possible he is the 21st centurys answer to Lewis?

Thats not an insult, even if we have mostly forgotten Lewis and what he meant to American literature. He was, after all, the first U.S. author to win a Nobel Prize in literature, and he created a vocabulary for talking about American culture that lasted until I was a kid in the 1970s. People were still describing someone as an Elmer Gantry and, yes, as a Babbitt. Each was effective shorthand for describing someone warped by the excesses of American culture, someone who, unknowingly infected by the sorts of desires Theodore Dreiser most famously drew, sets out to infect others with the same ones.

If Franzen isnt drawing characters as memorable in their essentials as Gantry or Babbitt, he is showing people who are similarly complicit in the same system that plagues them. If Lewiss characters got casually drunk in the middle of Prohibition, Franzens get casually stoned today. If Lewiss were bewildered by what the dawn of the automobile and telephone age meant for the way we live in it, Franzens do the same for the effects of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle.

All of that seems relevant because I cant quite decide how highly I regard Franzen. At the worst he is just what Lewis was: arguably the foremost chronicler of American dissatisfaction of his age. And yet, that said, Lewis was far from a hack. He made Naturalism relevant at the dawn of the Modern moment.