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The first seven chapters of Babbitt described a single day in George F. Babbitt\'s life. (In fact, Lewis\'s original plan was to center the entire novel around a single day, but he changed his mind.) Now the pace accelerates. It\'s sometime later the same spring. The Babbitts are planning a dinner party in celebration of a business deal that we know is slightly crooked. Dinner parties are important status symbols in Zenith, and Babbitt wants this one to demonstrate how far he\'s risen. He plans to invite his most \"highbrow\" friends.
Despite his anticipation, the morning of the party is a tense one for Babbitt. Nagged by his wife, he ventures a sacrilegious thought: he wonders if \"Floral Heights dinners were worth the hideous toil involved.\" Lewis, of course, wants you to see that the answer is no. The dinners are like so many other events in Zenith, empty rituals that blind people to the real joys of life. Babbitt ignores this truth in the excitement of buying liquor for his party.
NOTE: PROHIBITION \"Now this was the manner of obtaining alcohol under the reign of righteousness and prohibition.\" This reign of Prohibition, implemented by the Eighteenth Amendment, was one of the hallmarks of the 1920s, and to Lewis it represented all that was narrow-minded, stupidly puritanical, and hypocritical about America. As Babbitt enters Healey Hanson\'s saloon (where we earlier saw a murder), Lewis\'s point is clear: Babbitt calls himself honest and law-abiding, but he\'ll do business with criminals if he has to. Lewis\'s ironic description underlines the hypocrisy: Hanson becomes \"an honest merchant\" who speaks \"virtuously,\" and Babbitt feels \"honored by contact with greatness.\" This is the sorry state of honor and greatness in Zenith.
The fussy femininity of the Maison Vecchia caterer\'s shop spoils Babbitt\'s sense of triumph, and his good mood isn\'t restored until he\'s back home mixing a drink.
The guests arrive, and Lewis\'s introductions of them make this collection of \"highbrows\" sound very unimpressive indeed. There\'s dull, trivial Howard Littlefield, loud Vergil Gunch, car salesman Eddie Swanson, and Orville Jones who has tried to make his laundry business sound impressive by calling it \"a cleanerie shoppe.\" Most important of all, there\'s T. Cholmondeley Frink, author of \"Poemulations\" and \"Ads that Add.\"
With these men are their wives. Lewis analyzes the roles of the sexes in an interesting way. At first, he says, Zenith women all seem to be alike--chirping housewives. Yet as you get to know them you see that they\'re very different from one another. And though initially the men\'s variety of occupations makes their personalities seem equally varied, the business world of Zenith demands such conformity that there\'s really little difference between a \"poet\" like Chum Frink and a car salesman like Eddie Swanson.
The big moment has arrived: it\'s time for Babbitt to bring out his illicit liquor. Lewis mockingly compares the procedure to a \"canonical rite\"--a religious ceremony. Babbitt and his guests behave like teenagers sneaking their first beers. Especially enthusiastic is Chum Frink, who only hours before penned a poem (a horrible poem, of course) attacking liquor. Frink isn\'t alone in his hypocrisy: the whole group agrees that the lower classes can\'t be trusted with alcohol, but that good businessmen like themselves should be allowed to drink whenever they want. Once they\'ve finished with this \"required topic,\" the talk turns to smirking jokes about sex and about the superiority of Zenith over any small town.
NOTE: BABBITT AND MAIN STREET This dinner table conversation contrasts the city world of Babbitt to the small-town world Lewis satirized in his first popular novel, Main Street. In Main Street, Lewis called the midwestern small town confining and dull. Babbitt and his dinner guests would certainly agree. But when we hear that Prohibition is a \"required topic,\" and when we hear Vergil Gunch and Eddie Swanson and Howard Littlefield parrot the same beliefs in almost exactly the same words, we may doubt that Zenith is really any more sophisticated or cultured. That\'s Lewis\'s point. When Vergil Gunch enthusiastically says that every small town wants to be just like Zenith, Lewis intends us to realize that such a fate is far from being happy or noble.
Now Chum Frink flatters his fellow guests by sharing one of his literary dilemmas. He\'s tried his best to write an ad campaign for Zeeco Motors, he complains, but he hasn\'t been able to dream up anything as brilliant as the advertisements another writer created for Prince Albert tobacco.
NOTE: LITERATURE IN ZENITH With his pretentious name and his terrible writings, T. Cholmondeley Frink represents the sad state of the arts in Zenith, where ad campaigns are discussed as if they were great literature, while genuine literature goes ignored. (Later we\'ll see that Frink himself is well aware of his failure.)
As effective as Lewis\'s satire of Frink and Zenith is here, you should remember that he isn\'t ridiculing just one man or one city but a sizable segment of America in the twenties. Do you think he\'d be justified in making the same kind of attack today? How many of your friends, parents, or teachers are more familiar with last night\'s advertisement for hamburgers or shampoo than they are with Shakespeare or Milton? What do you read more of--the great literature of the past, or popular novels of the present? How important do you think it is to appreciate classic works of art, literature, and music?
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