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Babbitt Audiobook
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(3.49) - 216 listener ratings
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Publisher Description
In this sardonic portrait of the up-and-coming middle class during the prosperous 1920s, On the surface, everything is all right with Babbitt’s world of the solid, successful businessman. But in reality, George F. Babbitt is a lonely, middle-aged man. He doesn’t 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.
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"BABBITT is the devastatingly funny yet still endearing portrait of George Babbitt, a suburban real estate broker who is 46 in 1920. It's fascinating and disturbing when reading BABBITT to realize how little American business, American marriages, and American men have changed in the past 91 years. In 1920 gas cost 31 cents a gallon, liquor was illegal though in plentiful supply, and the internet had yet to be imagined, but George's emotional mix of bluster, bullying, babyish pouting, and his desperate need to be loved and admired are all but eternal. He's Homer Simpson in frameless glasses and a well-cut gray suit. His world of new suburbs built over old orchards, shady real-estate deals, conventions and lunches at which the gold old boys puff themselves up, drink themselves silly, and rant about the union-loving socialists who are killing the country hasn't changed much either. The genius of BABBITT is that it evokes my compassion for the kind of man I fear and despise when I encounter him in daily life.BABBITT is usually described as an acutely observed but somewhat poorly written novel about business. I'd say it's a brilliantly written novel about American marriage, and the extension of the social contract of marriage to the larger framework of American social life. As in MAIN STREET and DODSWORTH, BABBITT's focus is on the marital power struggle, where one party strives to enforce conformity to a shallow social order and the other fights for a more meaningful life. In MAIN STREET the wife was the rebel. In BABBITT it's George who longs to flee from the boredom of business, church, golf, and middle-aged marriage to "darkness beyond mysterious groves" with a dream girl who is slim, pale, and eager. George's wife Myra represents the forces of habit, affection, and convention that keep George from pursuing his dreams. In MAIN STREET, Lewis's sympathies are with the artistic woman who's oppressed by marriage and a small town. In BABBITT, we get the husband's point of view on the marriage, but Lewis doesn't fail to observe said husband with an amusingly ironic wife-shaped eye. By the time he wrote DODSWORTH, Lewis had lost his ironic perspective and gone over to a whole-hearted defense of the alcoholic overbearing husband. Which makes BABBITT, where the author doesn't take sides as he describes George and Myra fighting for the upper hand, Lewis's masterpiece.BABBITT was criticized by Mark Schorer, Lewis's principal biographer, for its "aesthetic crudities"; by Edith Wharton, to whom BABBITT was dedicated, for its "excess of slang"; and by Gore Vidal for its lack of plot. Probably they were all a little shocked by the radical technical innovations of a best-selling author. BABBITT's plotless pastiche of voices, including voices from social classes not usually thought of (certainly not by aristocratic Ms. Wharton) as a proper subject for literature, prefigures the postmodern techniques of writers such as William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, and William Burroughs. And Lewis's technique was no accident: as a man who'd made money selling plots to Jack London and had his most famous portrait done by Dadaist Man Ray Lewis certainly knew what he was doing when he structured BABBITT as a series of scenes that reveal George, mostly through dialogue, and from a succession of cubist angles. BABBITT resolves not with a dramatic climax but in an ironic circle when George, who in the first scene complains to his wife of a pain in his side that he thinks might be appendicitis, is in the end brought back to his marriage and his social group by his wife's operation for appendicitis. What's as remarkable as Lewis's technical innovations is that in spite of them BABBITT remains highly readable ninety years after it was written."
— Cdrueallen (5 out of 5 stars)
Quotes
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“[It is] by its hardness, its efficiency, its compactness that Mr. Lewis’ work excels.”
— Virginia Woolf -
“Sinclair Lewis is one of the major prophets of our time.”
— William Allen White, Pulitzer Prize winner -
“Mr. Lewis is a genius…an idealist, an artist.”
— London Observer -
“Babbitt is an authentic modern American classic, a biting satire of middle-American values that retains much of its poignancy today.”
— Library Journal
Babbitt Listener Reviews
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" Another classic by Sinclair Lewis. No my favorite book by him but well worth reading. "
— Don, 2/20/2014 -
" Listening to on audio on smart phone. "
— Teresa, 2/16/2014 -
" I listened to this as an audio book, usually before bed at night, and found it to be a perfect inducement to a drug-free sleep. I found it uninteresting, trite, hopelessly given to details I would rather not dwell upon. I made it to around chapter 7 or so, and then gave it up for a lost cause. "
— Lisa, 2/15/2014 -
" I always reread this when I feel overwhelmed by flim-flammery. "
— Meg, 2/11/2014 -
" I listened to this as an audio book, usually before bed at night, and found it to be a perfect inducement to a drug-free sleep. I found it uninteresting, trite, hopelessly given to details I would rather not dwell upon. I made it to around chapter 7 or so, and then gave it up for a lost cause. "
— Lisa, 2/8/2014 -
" I read every word of the first twelve chapters of this book, and began chapter 13 but didn't finish it. The book sat unopened, untouched, for more than a month. This is from the Wikipedia article on the book, and I agree wholeheartedly: "The middle third of the novel reveals Babbitt in various settings: on vacation, attending a business convention, campaigning for the conservative mayoral candidate, giving dinner parties, giving speeches, attempting (in vain) to climb socially, serving as a member of the Sunday School Advisory Committee of the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church, and so on. This section of the novel has drawn criticism about the thread of the plot becoming lost; critics have argued that Lewis seems to move aimlessly from one set-piece to another." It was fiercely aimless and had no thread whatsoever. I began to wonder if he would ever do more than drive to work, drive back again, and sit in the living room after dinner reading his newspaper, because we got that in great detail over and over. The amusing thing about the book is the lexicon of slang. It's a piece of cake to understand, but evidently when this book was released in England it had to have a glossary inserted. The slang, the spoken language, is an absolute hoot. If you're not after plot or anything more than a day-to-day description of life in cities in the midwest in the very early 1920s, it's great for that. The writing is amusing (props to Sinclair Lewis, and Babbitt is a comical character. We can see him much more clearly than he can see himself. But in terms of plot, sigh. It was hard to muscle through. I confess that I finally finished it only with help from SparkNotes and MonkeyNotes online. I had to read the quick summaries to figure out if anything interesting was going to happen (funnily, it began to go pear-shaped later on in the very chapter 13 I had abandoned) and I'd go and read a bit of that chapter then move on to summaries again. So now I know the SparkNotes version of Babbitt, and have read, I'd estimate, 50% of the book. It was mildly interesting, but just not my cup of tea. I read it online at Bartleby. If by any chance you want to take a peek: Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. "
— Alyson, 2/2/2014 -
" Like Hardy, one of my formerly favorite authors who I haven't read in years. "
— carl, 2/2/2014 -
" Tiresome and unconvincing. The story and characters take a back seat to Sinclair Lewis' political bellyaching. I know this is supposed to be satire but, from a reader's perspective, it's nice to have something real to connect with emotionally in a story. "Babbitt" is little more than a tirade. And nobody likes being shouted at. "
— Brian, 2/1/2014 -
" I wanted to love this novel, I really did. However, despite its intriguing message about social mores and conformity, I could not get over the American 1920's language that it was penned in. Although I personally found a strange sense of satisfaction in having finished it, I wouldn't recommend this book without heeding that warning. "
— Greg, 1/25/2014 -
" Great modern book, yet I expected a way more radical ending. Good fiction though, I recommend it to everyone. "
— Behzad, 1/25/2014 -
" I parable about middle-class America, the American dream and the life of George Babbitt, real estate salesman in the fictious town of Zenith. A frustrated, somewhat corrupt businessman with dreams of making it big, then develops some kind of moral fibre, only to give it all up to be "one of the boys" in the social club again. Reads a bit like George Orwell's "Coming up for air". "
— Larry, 1/25/2014
About Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), the son of a country doctor, was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. He attended Yale University, where he was editor of the literary magazine, and graduated in 1907. After a few of his stories had appeared in magazines and his first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), had been published, he was able to write full time. He was awarded the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (1925) but refused to accept the honor. However, he accepted the Nobel Prize awarded him in 1930. He was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
About Grover Gardner
Grover Gardner (a.k.a. Tom Parker) is an award-winning narrator with over a thousand titles to his credit. Named one of the “Best Voices of the Century” and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.