Book Review: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like Lucas Marsh (Not As a Stranger) and Andrew Manson (The Citadel), Martin Arrowsmith was dedicated to Medicine and not to the commercial aspects of the profession. He is a flawed hero, with no social skills – turning into a sociopath by the end of the story. Crucial to the 'success' of all three protagonists is the role of the women in their lives. This was the town-doctor’s room that inspired Arrowsmith to turn to medicine

The central room was at once business office, consultation-room, operating-theatre, living-room, poker den, and warehouse for guns and fishing tackle. Against a brown plaster wall was a cabinet of zoological collections and medical curiosities, and beside it the most dreadful and fascinating object known to the boy-world of Elk Mills – a skeleton with one gaunt gold tooth… On the wall was a home-stuffed pickerel on as home-varnished board. Beside the rusty stove, a saw-dust box cuspidor rested on a slimy oilcloth worn through to the threads. On the senile table was a pile of memoranda of debts… The most unsanitary corner was devoted to the cast-iron sink, which was oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates than for sterilizing instruments. On its ledge were a broken test-tube, a broken fishhook, an unlabeled and forgotten bottle of pills, a nail-bristling heel, a frayed cigar-butt, and a rusty lancet stuck in a potato. The wild raggedness of the room was the soul and symbol of Doc Vickerson.

The book is a satire on mediocrity and the bane of self-aggrandizing charlatans that sprout like mushrooms in the rains – charlatans like Wesley Mouch (Atlas Shrugged). It is an indictment of imposters and frauds in science that come up with committees with fanciful names that canvass against innovation and original research.

There was an eerie feeling of déjà vu when I read this

From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas, down through walled market-place, across a desert, along hot yellow rivers…and here and there on its way a man was black and stilled with plague

And again

the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel (although the author did not accept it) propelled with other satirical works like Babbitt and Main Street eventually deservedly propelled the author towards a Noble Prize in Literature.

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