Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/222

 just emerging from college may be congratulated that his devastating searchlight is still playing upon the middle-aged. His new novel Babbitt is not a sequel to Main Street but a parallel and co-ordinate extension. It is a picture of contemporary American society not in the small towns and villages but in the cities of some numerical pretensions. Zenith, the prosperous midwestern city of 350,000, in which George F. Babbitt, the prosperous "realtor," establishes himself on Floral Heights, is inhabited largely by people who had in their youth ambition enough to get up and get out of the "hick burgs." They flatter themselves that, leaving behind them all the elements that constituted the dinginess and dreariness of Gopher Prairie, they have pressed forward to the mark of the high calling of hustling, right-thinking, forward-looking boosters, good-fellows, and 100% Americans. For iron they have substituted copper sinks in the kitchen; for the Saturday night tubbing, the daily bath; for goldenoak, near mahogany; for the Ford the limousine; for the dirty ramshackle huddle of shops and visibly suspendered tobacco-chewing shopkeepers, blocks of aspiring office buildings and hotels with manicure girls attending in the Pompeian Barber Shop; for the somnolent barn-like church, an up-to-date competitive "community centre" with press-agents, military organization, and pep-masters; for cigars and poker in the parlor with Sam Clark and "the boys," monogrammed cigarettes and mixed auction bridge at the country club; for "open meetings" of the