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Book meme! Day 10
Jul. 30th, 2010 10:40 pmDay 10 - A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis. I swear I'm not trying to be pretentious. We had to read this for my junior year AP English class. It sounded just awful. It has stuck with me forever.
I think part of the effect of the book came from the context I was in when I read it - that was the summer I spent at my grandmother's apartment in Manhattan with my dad, after my grandmother died and before we made the building owners VERY happy by not continuing the lease (the apartment was rent controlled, and had been rent controlled for a Very Long Time).
My grandfather was a guy who had ambitions that he didn't really get to follow. In different ways, so was my dad. There was a lot of love between them that never managed to communicate itself very well. (I actually saw the Beautiful People letter that my dad wrote my grampa during the 60s. It was seriously a Beautiful People letter just like in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)
So here I was in this apartment that was slowly being emptied of its decades of tasteful knick knacks, clothes, and mementos. There were the books on the wall about writing novels, mystery, and science fiction that my advertising copy writing grandfather never made use of - or at least, never cracked into fiction with. He had pretty wide ranging taste - Tony Hillerman, A. E. vanVogt, the best of Galaxy, plays of Jean Anouilh. He wanted to write fiction and got nowhere with it. He was quite successful with the advertising.
I was lying in the bedroom on the chenille spread, and reading about this guy who is totally crushed by the life he's agreed to have, the life other people pushed on him. A life he didn't even really have the language to protest effectively.
And he really... I think that people get Babbitt all wrong. To my mind he was deeply heroic, because in the end he found the courage to be a lot like an Indigo Girls song and let the next life off the hook.
In a way I think his story is very noir - it seems like his life is fine until he falls through the cracks. And once he's fallen through he can never not see them. But neither can he escape them. His life is overdetermined.
Also, the story was written with such specificity. I can still see him contemplating the pile of rusting razor blades on the top of the medicine cabinet.
The book gave me a lot more empathy for my parents and grand parents, and for all the people who make choices and then realize that the choices they made didn't fit them, or weren't taken from a big enough set - that there were other sets of choices out there.
( Book meme list )
Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis. I swear I'm not trying to be pretentious. We had to read this for my junior year AP English class. It sounded just awful. It has stuck with me forever.
I think part of the effect of the book came from the context I was in when I read it - that was the summer I spent at my grandmother's apartment in Manhattan with my dad, after my grandmother died and before we made the building owners VERY happy by not continuing the lease (the apartment was rent controlled, and had been rent controlled for a Very Long Time).
My grandfather was a guy who had ambitions that he didn't really get to follow. In different ways, so was my dad. There was a lot of love between them that never managed to communicate itself very well. (I actually saw the Beautiful People letter that my dad wrote my grampa during the 60s. It was seriously a Beautiful People letter just like in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)
So here I was in this apartment that was slowly being emptied of its decades of tasteful knick knacks, clothes, and mementos. There were the books on the wall about writing novels, mystery, and science fiction that my advertising copy writing grandfather never made use of - or at least, never cracked into fiction with. He had pretty wide ranging taste - Tony Hillerman, A. E. vanVogt, the best of Galaxy, plays of Jean Anouilh. He wanted to write fiction and got nowhere with it. He was quite successful with the advertising.
I was lying in the bedroom on the chenille spread, and reading about this guy who is totally crushed by the life he's agreed to have, the life other people pushed on him. A life he didn't even really have the language to protest effectively.
And he really... I think that people get Babbitt all wrong. To my mind he was deeply heroic, because in the end he found the courage to be a lot like an Indigo Girls song and let the next life off the hook.
In a way I think his story is very noir - it seems like his life is fine until he falls through the cracks. And once he's fallen through he can never not see them. But neither can he escape them. His life is overdetermined.
Also, the story was written with such specificity. I can still see him contemplating the pile of rusting razor blades on the top of the medicine cabinet.
The book gave me a lot more empathy for my parents and grand parents, and for all the people who make choices and then realize that the choices they made didn't fit them, or weren't taken from a big enough set - that there were other sets of choices out there.
( Book meme list )
