What does /lit/ think of Babbitt?

>>9950462
/lit/ has never heard of it because it's not Moby Dick or Infinite Jest. But Babbitt, like Main Street, is truly insightful. Lewis is the first novelist where the America of today appears fully recognizable.

That said, Lewis is a better sociologist than a novelist. Neither of Babbitt nor Main Street really shine artistically. Among his contemporaries, I go to John Dos Passos for that.

Anyone read Arrowsmith?

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Babbitt is lovely, though I still prefer Main Street. Like anon above me I truly believe Lewis is criminally underread, both here and elsewhere. But I do also believe he has a great talent for prose. Take a look at the first part of Main Street, for instance:

ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.
A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth.
It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.
The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.

>>9951277
He certainly can manage passages of quality prose, he's adroit with tone, and he sets a scene well (having grown up in one of those towns described in Main Street [and my grandmother is from his home town], I can testify to their portrait-perfect accuracy even to this day.) But both Main Street and Babbitt seemed to lack any cohesive structure. The of string-of-pearls structure has a clear purpose in the Quixote, but feels meandering in Lewis. Plus he can lay it on awfully thick. The passage you've cited is one where he nails the balance - genuine affection for the American Midwest dramatic-ironically aware that the affection is a product of a dangerous seduction - but not all of them are so good. I don't have a copy handy, unfortunately.

I've already recommended Dos Passos as an example where I think the contrast is clear. Dos Passos never browbeats and his novels are so beautifully architected that he makes Babbitt look like a shanty-town.

The same contrast illustrated negatively: watch Dreiser. Lewis is definitely a more adroit writer, but both of them overwork their subjects in a way that Dos Passos (or Fitzgerald) doesn't.*

*for the record, it works pretty well in American Tragedy. The sheer volume of banal journalistic detail ends up giving the thing a real heft that I didn't see coming.

But seriously, has anyone read Arrowsmith? Babbitt and Main-Street were so precisely accurate to American culture even today, I wonder if Arrowsmith might resemble modern-day Silicon Valley or if California really has produced something "new."

I'll read it eventually, but it'd move up in the docket if I had a good recommendation.

>>9951448
And, speaking of architecture, it's not that Lewis has none. He apparently drew out complete cities maps of Zenith along with colossal folders of city-details. The restraint he exercised in using that research is tremendous. He puts Tolkein and their like to shame.

This quote from wikipedia shows what I mean (and kills me every time):

Zenith is a fictitious city in the equally fictitious Midwestern state of "Winnemac," adjacent to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. When Babbitt was published, newspapers in Cincinnati, Duluth, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis each claimed that their city was the model for Zenith. Cincinnati had perhaps the strongest claim, as Lewis had lived there while researching the book. Lewis's own correspondence suggests, however, that Zenith is meant to be any Midwestern city with a population between about 200,000 and 300,000

>>9950963
>>9951448
Is the USA trilogy worth the money?

>>9952903
Yes. Also, check used bookstores. They usually have massmarkets of the individual books.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5n1pZn4izI

Babbitt on smoking is me on /lit/

>>9950963
>/lit/ has never heard of it because it's not Moby Dick or Infinite Jest
This.

>>9950963
>Anyone read Arrowsmith?
No, but I want to soon. What's it like?

whenever i hear the word 'babbit' i think of that chick who cut that guys dick off in the 90s