reading material

I finished reading two books in the last 24 hours, not because I'm such a crazy fast reader (I'm actually a slow reader) or anything. Babbitt took me several weeks to finish and the other one, Four To Score is one of the Stephanie Plum series and I always read them in a day. They are short and fast and hard to put down.

Four To Score is one of the best of the series. Really hilarious. I even read some parts aloud to my husband, they were so funny. Not much else to say about that.

Babbitt, however, by Sinclair Lewis, was awesome. It follows George F. Babbitt, a real estate man, husband, father, and otherwise Solid Citizen as he goes about his life. He's a Republican, an American, a member of several organizations, like the Athletic Club and the Booster Club and the Elks, and attends the Presbyterian church most Sundays. He owns his own business, co-owned with his father-in-law. He secretly isn't in love with his wife but likes the moral high ground and being a good citizen, so he doesn't have affairs. He is greedy, self centered, and materialistic. He's a back slapper and a fisherman and a poker player and a good ol' boy and pretty much every stereotype you can name to fit the white, conservative, middle class, businessman. The book is at once a scathing criticism and a sympathetic portrait.

It follows George Babbitt as he comes to realize that he's not really happy with his life. He does something about it, falls from the grace of his friends and the business community, and eventually goes back to being the same person he was before, taking up the same ideas and life he was so sick of in the beginning, but now renewed in them, choosing them, even as he knows he may be wrong. This is the way things are done. But that summary makes the book sound rather sad and a downer, and it isn't. It's funny and ends on an upbeat note, even as you know George will never change.

It is also a startlingly relevant book to today. Beginning with the main character, George is "nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay." Haven't we seen something like that recently?

In the twenties there was a big uproar about unions and how workers unions were going to turn the whole country communist, destroy business, coddle everyone, undo the American way, etc. etc. And this is the issue facing George Babbitt. Of course, George stands against unions and fair pay for workers along with all the rest of the Boosters and business men in his aquaintance. At one crucial point in the book Babbitt talks with Seneca Doane, a local politician who had recently been defeated in favor of a candidate Babbitt and his good old boys prefered, partially with the help of Babbitt's stump speeches. Doane is for workers' rights. Babbitt says to Doane:

"Oh. Like dancing?"

"Naturally. I like dancing and pretty women and
good food better than anything else in the world. Most
men do."

"But gosh, Doane, I thought you fellows wanted to
take all the good eats and everything away from us."

"No. Not at all. What I'd like to see is the meetings
of the Garment Workers held at the Ritz, with a dance
afterward. Isn't that reasonable?"

Isn't that reasonable? But I am both a liberal and a feminist, two words that have turned into insults and generally bring up images of humorless, politically correct (another term that has become an insult, as if there were something wrong in being aware of our language and the hidden and subtle ways we demean people), and angry.

I loved the book and I loved the character, just for giving me a sympathetic handle on a sort of person that I would otherwise like to demonize.