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Paul Riesling is Babbitt\'s best--perhaps his only true--friend. In some ways, he\'s the most extreme example of the damage Zenith inflicts on its citizens, of the crippling disappointments they suffer when their personal dreams are sacrificed to Zenith\'s demands for commercial success. Once a promising violinist, Riesling had hoped to study music in Europe. Instead, he\'s a roofing manufacturer, unhappily married, playing his violin only for friends.
Riesling is one of the most intelligent characters in the novel. His thoughts about Zenith--that it is a place of cutthroat competition and conformity, where one-third of the people are openly miserable and another third secretly unhappy--are similar to Lewis\'s own views. Still, some readers have found him an unsympathetic character in some ways. Paul blames his wife, Zilla, for all his suffering and seems to ignore the fact that he has made her suffer too. When at last his rage and depression lead him to shoot Zilla, he realizes too late she deserved his understanding more than his anger. Intelligent critic of Zenith, or self-pitying weakling? Victim or criminal? How do you see Paul?
After Paul is sent to prison he virtually disappears from the novel. With him goes the one relationship Babbitt truly valued. That loss sets the stage for Babbitt\'s own open rebellion.
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