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Babbitt tends to be oblivious to his children until they do something out of the ordinary. Now events force him to pay attention to his son and daughter. Verona Babbitt is spending a lot of time with reporter Kenneth Escott, and Babbitt hopes a romance is developing.
Ted Babbitt disturbs his father more. Like a lot of fathers, Babbitt has hopes for Ted that his son isn\'t particularly interested in fulfilling. He wants Ted to have the law career he didn\'t have, but Ted wants only to work on his car and spend time with cute, frivolous, movie-mad Eunice Littlefield.
NOTE: BABBITT AS A FATHER Throughout the book, Lewis takes pleasure in making fun of Babbitt\'s many faults. But he doesn\'t want us to ignore Babbitt\'s virtues either. Here we see one of those virtues. Babbitt, Lewis says, is an average father, sometimes bullying, opinionated, ignorant. But he has \"the eternal human genius for arriving by the worst possible routes at surprisingly tolerable goals.\" For all his failings, Babbitt genuinely loves his son. We\'ll see that love playing a part in the book\'s ending.
Showing Babbitt in his role as sympathetic father is one of the ways Lewis presents him as a well-rounded character, not just a one-dimensional clown or villain. Do you think that Babbitt makes up for his failings by being a well-intentioned father?
Still there is a gap between Ted\'s generation and Babbitt\'s, and we see it widen vividly when Ted throws a party for his high school friends. Babbitt hopes the party will be like the ones he remembers from his high school days, but Ted and his friends have different ideas.
NOTE: BABBITT AND THE 1920S Especially in its politics, Zenith may seem to us a very conservative place. But great changes in social custom were occurring in America in the 1920s, notably among the young, and not even conservative, midwestern cities like Zenith were immune. Girls like Eunice, from respectable families, were doing things their mothers never would have dreamed of doing--smoking cigarettes, bobbing their hair, wearing short skirts, and using makeup. Young women and young men both were more open about sex. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald brilliantly chronicled these changes in stories like \"Bernice Bobs Her Hair.\" Ted\'s party represents Lewis\'s attempt to do the same.
You\'ll notice, though, that Lewis doesn\'t really want you to think that Ted and his friends are more independent-minded than their parents. Ted\'s party is \"as fixed and standardized as a Union Club hop,\" for in Zenith the pressures to conform affect even the young.
We\'ve seen the gap between Babbitt and the younger generation. Now when Babbitt\'s dull, pious mother comes to visit, we see the gap between Babbitt and the older generation. Still living in the small town, Catawba, where Babbitt was born, she understands nothing of modern Zenith and embarrasses Babbitt with her reminiscences of his childhood. Babbitt\'s half brother, Martin, is another reminder of the older, rural America that Zenith is replacing. As always, Lewis refuses to be nostalgic about that vanishing America: Martin is a crude man who cares only what things cost.
These visits, along with his children\'s squabbles and demands, feed Babbitt\'s irritation at family life, and he\'s pleased when a case of the flu makes him the center of attention. Yet the illness also increases his restlessness, his depression. As he lies in bed, he bleakly realizes what Lewis has made us realize throughout the novel--that almost every aspect of his business, social, and religious life is mechanical and false. He may have wasted his life, he fears. He doesn\'t want to go back to work. But back he goes.
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