Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt is a very irritating book, and I'm not sure I'll be able to finish it. It's one of those books that I know was very important at its time of writing, but its prose and style of sarcasm has aged so badly that I find it painful to read. Take this passage, for instance, a so-called off-the-cuff remark that Babbitt emits at the breakfast table:

"Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God's world by the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man learns he isn't going to be coddled, and he needn't expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns 'em, why, the sooner he'll get on the job and produce--produce--produce! That's what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class!"

Of course, I'm not arguing against the validity of the satire, which is still pertinent. But the quoted remark is not a breakfast-table conversation; it's manufactured polemic clumsily disguised as breakfast-table conversation. And the whole book appears to be cast in this mold, and it's making me tired.