Babbitt

The Word That Became a Noun

Babbitt was published in 1922, two years after Main Street, and where the earlier novel attacked the small town, this one attacked the city — or rather, the Midwestern city as a particular kind of social formation, with its Booster clubs and Rotary luncheons and real estate conventions and civic pride that is indistinguishable from commercial self-interest. Lewis named his fictional city Zenith, set it in the fictional state of Winnemac, and made it the most detailed and specific imaginary American city in fiction. Within a few years, “babbitt” had entered the English language as a common noun meaning a smug, conformist, philistine businessman. The portrait had been recognized.

George Follansbe Babbitt is forty-six years old, a real estate agent in Zenith, a booster and joiner and committee member and suburban homeowner. He has a wife, two children, a house in Floral Heights, a car he is intensely proud of, and a set of opinions that are indistinguishable from the opinions of every other prosperous Zenith businessman. He is not happy. He does not know this, exactly, but he suspects it in the form of a recurring dream — a fairy child in a magic garden — and in the uneasy feeling that his life has become a series of performances with no one watching.

The Rebellion

About halfway through the novel, Babbitt rebels. His friend Paul Riesling — the one friend who has ever seemed real to him, the one person Babbitt can be approximately honest with — shoots his wife and goes to prison. The event breaks something in Babbitt’s social confidence, and he begins, tentatively and without much conviction, to deviate: he takes a liberal position on a labor dispute, he begins an affair with a widow, he associates with a bohemian crowd that holds opinions his business friends consider dangerous.

Lewis is precise about the nature and limits of this rebellion. It is not ideological — Babbitt does not develop convictions. It is not romantic in any meaningful sense — the affair provides companionship rather than passion. It is simply the behavior of a man who has briefly stopped performing his social role and is trying to find out what he actually is underneath it. The answer, Lewis shows with uncomfortable honesty, is not very different from what the performance indicated.

Return to Zenith

The rebellion collapses under social pressure — Babbitt’s business associates make clear that his liberal associations are damaging his career, and he is susceptible to exactly the pressures Lewis has spent the novel anatomizing. He returns to the Good Citizens’ League, to boosterism, to the opinions he is supposed to hold. The ending is not triumphant but it is not entirely defeated either: Babbitt’s son announces that he is dropping out of college to marry a factory girl, and Babbitt — in the novel’s most unexpectedly moving moment — tells him to go ahead and fight for what he wants. “I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life,” Babbitt tells his son. It is the most honest thing he says in the novel, and it comes at the end, when there is nothing left to do with the honesty except pass it on.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — The definitive portrait of American business conformity — a character so precisely observed that his name became the English language’s word for what he represents.

The Word That Entered the Language

The most reliable measure of a satirical novel’s accuracy is whether its central characterization enters the language as a common noun. “Babbitt” — meaning a smug, conformist, philistine businessman — was in widespread use within a few years of the novel’s publication and remains available in English to this day. Lewis achieved the same with “Elmer Gantry” (a fraudulent revivalist preacher) and contributed to the currency of “Main Street” (small-town conformity) as cultural shorthand. This linguistic legacy is not merely testimony to Lewis’s marketing success; it indicates that he identified genuine social types with sufficient precision that the culture needed words for them.

The specificity of Zenith — its particular streets, its civic organizations, its newspaper, its real estate market — is what makes Babbitt a type rather than a caricature. A caricature exaggerates a few features; a type is built from observed particulars assembled with such care that the whole becomes recognizable to anyone who knows the original. Lewis had spent years observing the American Midwest, and Zenith is a composite of every Midwestern city he had moved through: the detail is not invented but selected.

The Friendship With Riesling

The novel’s most emotionally precise relationship is between Babbitt and Paul Riesling — the one friendship in Babbitt’s life in which something approaching genuine honesty is possible. Riesling wanted to be a violinist; he became instead a roofing-paper manufacturer. He is less successfully Babbitt than Babbitt, slightly more aware of what he has given up, and his awareness is what makes the friendship valuable and ultimately unbearable. The two men can be almost honest with each other because they share the same condition and the same knowledge of it, and the friendship gives the novel its emotional depth beneath the satirical surface.

Riesling’s shooting of his wife — triggered by what the novel presents as an accumulation of small domestic tyrannies that Babbitt has never noticed because he has never looked — is the pivot of the novel’s second half. It breaks Babbitt’s confidence in the world he inhabits and opens the space in which his rebellion becomes possible. That the rebellion fails, and that the failure is entirely convincing, is Lewis’s most honest observation: the social world that produced Babbitt is more powerful than Babbitt’s individual capacity to resist it, and individual resistance, unanchored in any genuine alternative vision, is not enough.

The Final Moment

The novel’s most unexpected and moving moment is its last: Babbitt telling his son Ted, who is dropping out of college to marry a factory girl, to go ahead and fight for what he wants. “I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life,” Babbitt says. It is the most honest thing he says in the novel, and it arrives at the moment when honesty is no longer of any use to him personally — only transmissible, perhaps, to someone younger. Whether Ted will actually manage to do what Babbitt could not is a question Lewis leaves open, with characteristic honesty about the limited power of individual will against social pressure. But the gesture of passing on the possibility — of not pretending to his son that the life he lived was what he wanted — is the closest Babbitt comes to genuine freedom, and Lewis gives it to him without irony at the very end.