Babbitt

Meet George F. Babbitt: forty-six years old, prosperous, respectable, and quietly desperate. He's a real estate broker in the fictional city of Zenith, a man who has everything the American Dream promised, and none of it satisfies. Lewis gives us access to Babbitt's private thoughts, and that's where the comedy lives: he knows his life is hollow, he dreams of rebellion, and then he immediately talks himself out of it. The novel follows his failed attempts at nonconformity, his quarrels with his wife, his friendships with other businessmen who speak entirely in clichés, and his slow, inevitable return to the comfortable prison of conformity. Babbitt is both a savage indictment of middle-class American life and a strangely moving portrait of a man who can see the cage but can't bring himself to leave it. The word 'Babbitt' entered the English language for good reason: we all know this man. We might even be this man.