This is the story of a midlife crisis.

One of the historical criticisms of Babbitt has been that it has no plot. George F. Babbitt, the protagonist, is a realtor, with a brown, drab wife named Myra, a serious daughter in her 20s named Verona, a son in his late teens, the irrepressible Ted, and a ten-year-old daughter nicknamed Tinka, who retains her childhood aura of innocence and indifference throughout most of the novel. They live in the unimpeachable suburb of Floral Heights in the small Midwestern city of Zenith, variously said to have been modeled on Cincinnati, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee. The first few chapters take up just one day in Babbitt’s life, getting the reader fully acquainted and situated with the social atmosphere of middle-class, business-owning Zenith. Babbitt is a Republican voter, a Presbyterian, pro-business and anti-immigration, jovially and impersonally antisemitic, a member of the Athletic Club, the Boosters Club, and the Order of Good Fellows. He is, in other words, a certain kind of Americana personified. What precipitates the change in his life, partway through the novel, is his friend Paul. Paul shoots his own wife, Zilla, in despair at the aridity and unhappiness of their marriage, for which he can see no end in sight. He doesn’t kill her, but maims her for life, and is sentenced to several years in prison.

This event is an earthquake for Babbitt. When he first hears that Paul has shot Zilla—recounted to him over the phone by Myra—he is too busy boasting to her of his election to vice president of the Athletic Club to listen to what she is saying; she has to repeat herself more than three times. The news shakes his provincial self-satisfaction to the core. This feels right to me. Bereavement, crime, the intrusion of violence: those are things that can change the material quality of a life in a moment, and therefore they are also things that can force introspection, a kind of reckoning. In Babbitt’s case, he is not intellectual enough to think through his own dissatisfaction, but he is just sensitive enough to feel it properly for the first time in years. His response is to have an affair with a customer, the splendidly-named widow Mrs. Tanis Judique. Tanis’s friends are bohemians, or as bohemian as you can get in the Midwest in the 1920s: they flout Prohibition openly, drive too fast, throw loud parties, stay up late, quarrel publicly. Babbitt’s sojourn among “the Bunch” is, in a manner of speaking, a bid for mental and spiritual freedom (reflected also by his vocal championing of Seneca Doane, a local lawyer he had previously decried, along with his Booster Club pals, as an unpatriotic socialist). But ultimately it’s just as empty a life as the suburban rounds of Sunday School committees and dinner parties, and Babbitt isn’t well suited to this form of rebellion, either.

What brings him back is Myra’s sudden illness. She has already confronted him, in desperation and anger, about his affair, in a passage which contains some of Lewis’s most incisive and honest writing on the sexual double standard and the cruel asymmetry of white suburban middle-class male entitlement to the labours and loyalties of their wives. When she is suddenly taken into hospital and has to undergo major surgery, Babbitt repents: he realises that he does love her, cannot bear the thought of her death, and he has already lost nearly all of his friends over his sociopolitical non-conformism. It is the mirror image of Paul’s attempted murder, and it has the same effect, like an amnesiac being hit hard on the head again. The threat of mortality can bounce us out of our daily rut, or throw us back in.

At the end of the novel, Babbitt has returned to the bosom of Presbyterianism, Republicanism, monogamy, and commerce. His son Ted, however, ends the book on a note that echoes the generational-change aspect of The Age of Innocence‘s ultimate scene. He elopes with Eunice Littlefield, the literal girl next door. Ted’s announcement that Eunice is now his wife is met with horror and resistance by both Myra and Verona (whose allegedly radical social ideas demonstrably do not stand up to the test). But Babbitt—the conservative patriarch par excellence—wonders if it’s really all that bad. After all, what’s done is done, and Eunice seems a nice girl. The final sentence of the book has “the Babbitt men” setting out to confront the disapproval of their womenfolk.

So it’s the story of one man’s midlife crisis. But it’s also a tragedy, read one way—Babbitt is ultimately too complacent to change his life—and a bittersweet Shakespearean comedy read another way—Babbitt runs around the Athenian woods for a while but ultimately finds his way home. It’s also worth thinking about the novel as a microcosmic representation of something that was happening on a wider scale. America’s midlife crisis, perhaps, as its manufacturing and political importance became global, as it became pompous, morally compromised by prosperity, lost its youthful zip.

This is the seventh book for my year-long American Classics reading project.