Her ideal is man’s position of social independence. This she attains to the fullest measure in the business world. But trouble comes after she has experienced love, marriage and the duties of a mother of a family. After a series of crushing disasters, she discovers that modern teaching does not tend to make for that home life to which she, in her youth, had been accustomed, and from whose charm she had never really freed herself.
The book has the same weak point as its predecessor, “If Winter Comes”. Mr. Hutchinson does not seem to have the courage to write a tragedy. After he has masterfully created a heap of wreckage, he vainly attempts restoration in a few concluding paragraphs. It is as impossible for the reader to conceive of recovery in the case of Rosalie and Harry as it was to imagine a future happiness for Nona and Marco.
It is to be hoped that we shall soon have a real tragedy from the pen of this popular author, for then we shall put down the book perhaps sadder but at least more impressed.
M. T.
Babbitt. By Sinclair Lewis. (Harcourt, Brace & Co.)
If “Babbitt” is a better book than “Main Street”, as its publishers would have us believe, then Mr. Lewis’ improvement is to be found in an even greater application to the details; the minute cataloguing of commonplace incident. It is infinitely painstaking. But for those of us who believe that “Main Street” in itself showed an unnecessary virtuosity in that talent, this is hardly to be rated as an advance.
“Babbitt” is not so much to be considered as better or worse than “Main Street”, as a companion volume in Mr. Lewis’ series of compendiums of all that is tawdry, and hypocritical, and typical, in the contemporary life of the American middle class.
Babbitt is the “average” American business man; a real estate dealer (“realtor”, as he pridefully insists on being called); a Rotarian, Booster, member of the Athletic Club, and solid citizen. He has a squabbling family; a wife whom he tolerates, and three children whom he loves impatiently—because he cannot understand them. Little attention is given to a plot; the development is rather in exhaustive study and analysis. From the time when Babbitt gets up to shave, until the time when he makes sure (for the second time) that all the doors in the house are locked, no detail of his life, personal, family, business, or social, is omitted. And each detail is analyzed. Sometimes it is satirized; and often the attempted satirization becomes an over-done burlesque.
Like Carol Kennicott, Babbitt is filled with dissatisfaction; and a realization (more vague than hers, because he cannot understand it) of the meaningless hypocrisy of his life. But his revolt is not intellectual, and therefore the pain of frustration in the inevitable defeat at the end is not so keen.
I do not hold with those critics who condemn Mr. Lewis for presenting only one side of his picture. I agree that he does present only one side—but are there not a great many times as many authors who write only of the so-called “pleasant” side? And are not Mr. Lewis’ characterizations far closer to the actual verities?