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Mrs. Babbitt has been married too long to feel any real sympathy for her husband\'s complaints, Lewis says, but long enough to know she must fake such sympathy. And like the Babbitts\' marriage, the Babbitts\' house is more fake than genuine, designed more to impress than to be lived in. The rooms are acceptably modern, but nothing in them is quite real--the furniture is \"very much like mahogany,\" and Mrs. Babbitt\'s toilet articles are \"almost solid silver.\" But the Babbitt house, the narrator comments, is not a home.
The restlessness that Babbitt felt upon awakening stays with him at breakfast. He grows annoyed with his daughter, Verona, just graduated from Bryn Mawr and very sure of her intellectual abilities. Verona wants to do charity work, which to Babbitt is almost socialism--a forbidden belief. Meanwhile, Ted Babbitt is fighting with his sister for use of the car. Their squabble is an exaggerated version of arguments every family has but it makes you wonder if the younger Babbitts are any more intelligent than their parents.
Babbitt now turns his attention to the morning newspaper.
NOTE: STANDARDIZATION OF THOUGHT One of the most important themes in Babbitt is the way American society, though supposedly free and democratic, tells its citizens what they should think. It\'s able to do that, in large part, because citizens like Babbitt are too lazy to think for themselves. Just as Babbitt\'s furniture is little different from his neighbors\', his ideas too are echoes of the accepted norm.
You\'ll want to compare Babbitt\'s world to yours. Do you think most middle-class Americans still tend to share the same political opinions--for example, on relations with the Soviet Union, on taxation, on minorities and women? Do the newspapers and magazines and television of today give you a truer picture of the world than the Zenith Advocate-Times gives Babbitt? Are Americans today better informed, or just as smugly ignorant?
In a gooey, overwritten society column (the first of many newspaper parodies in Babbitt), Babbitt reads about his wealthy college classmate, Charles McKelvey. Though he calls McKelvey a snob, it\'s clear that he and Mrs. Babbitt both want to be invited to a McKelvey party. We\'ll see that worries about social status are common in Zenith. Babbitt so sympathizes with his wife\'s social aspirations that he feels a moment of genuine sympathy. \"You\'re a great old girl, Hon!\" he says. But it\'s a brief moment, and Babbitt covers it up with more characteristic behavior: a complaint.
NOTE: DIALOGUE IN BABBITT When Babbitt talks about having \"a lot liver [livelier] times\" than a bunch of \"plutes\" (short for plurocrats, or rich people), it\'s an example of one of Lewis\'s favorite literary techniques--that of imitating, and exaggerating for comic effect, the slang-filled speech of ordinary 1920s Americans. Some readers have felt that Lewis overdoes this kind of dialogue. But for other readers, Babbitt\'s dialogue is responsible for much of the book\'s vitality and humor.
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