Babbit by Sinclair Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Success of Failure

Babbitt is perhaps the first comic novel of mid-life crisis. It shows Lewis at his most Dickens-like, creating prototypical American characters that live on in cultural mythology.

The issue is this: How does an imperfect male human being, knowing his flaws only too well, make his way in an equally flawed society - without sacrificing either his own integrity or his ability to participate in that society? Lewis answer: Essentially he can't. Everything is irrational compromise.

Plato's Socrates came to the same conclusion in the Republic. It is also the inevitability posed by Camus in his letters. It was the third century Christian theologian Tertullian who came up with the most precise formulation: Credo quia absurdum est, I believe in it because it is absurd.

Babbitt's middle class American life is an absurdity. That he comes to terms with this absurdity is his, and our, only hope. Highly recommended as literary therapy during the reign of Donald Trump... or to understand where Philip Roth finds much of his inspiration.

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