Arrowsmith (Sinclair Lewis, 1925)

I don't think I much care for this kind of work.  It was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1925.  The dust jacket lauds Sinclair Lewis "at the peak of his powers as satirist and social chronicler, vigorously unmasking the pretenses and hypocrisies of American middle-class life."

But why is this such a great thing to do?  The fact that we humans are laden with absurdities can hardly be news to anyone.  The novelists I prefer do plenty of "unmasking" - but with gentleness and humor, and with a recognition that typically there is lots of good enmeshed with the absurd (examples, in my opinion = Proust, Dostoevsky).

This work reminded me of this famous, much-lauded work by Sherwood Anderson - which I also didn't much care for.

In this one, Arrowsmith is a Midwesterner who ends up in med school.  Lengthy passages about his days in school - his frat, the classes, the climbers, Dr. Gottlieb (his hero), his girlfriend (who he throws over to marry Leora).  Lengthy passages about his initial medical practice - in small-town North Dakota.  Next he works as a public health official in an Iowa town - lab work being his preferred work.  Next he works for a year in a clinic in Chicago with one of his med school compadres.  Next gets invited to work with Dr. Gottlieb in a research institute in New York City.

There is a plague in the Caribbean; his research comes into play.  Lots of angst about research and medicine as commerce.  The descriptions from each of his work settings were interesting - various aspects of medicine in early 20th-century - supposedly Lewis worked very closely with a doctor or doctors to make this reasonably realistic.

Easy reading, not sure it was worth 470 pages.  This Library of America edition also includes Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth, each of which I shall skip.