"He reflected (it was an international debate in which he was joined by a few and damned by many) that half a dozen generations nearly free from epidemics would produce a race so low in natural immunity that when a great plague, suddenly springing from almost-zero to a world-smothering cloud, appeared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that the measures to save lives to which he lent his genius might in the end be the destruction of all human life."
"Arrowsmith" succeeds despite the relative unlikeability of its protagonist and namesake, Martin Arrowsmith. Sinclair Lewis follows Martin as he fumbles his way through medical school and attempts to find his place in a society obsessed with upward mobility and finding the measure of a man through his bank account.
" … He could never understand that esoteric phenomenon, the dinner-party – the painful entertainment of people whom one neither likes nor finds interesting."
Written in 1925 and earning the Pulitzer Price (Lewis declined the award), the novel is occasionally weighed down by problematic language and a dearth of action, but the character-sketching is top notch. "Arrowsmith" works best as a condemnation of publicity and a celebration of the value of hard work, and is capable of balancing pedantic, scientific language with the ability to evoke real, earned emotion.
"He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove tuberculosis and the other major plagues, the world was grimly certain to become so overcrowded, to become such a universal slave-packed shambles, that all beauty and ease and wisdom would disappear in a famine-driven scamper for existence."
"Years after, in a tropic noon, he remembered the freshness of her wind-cooled cheeks."
A meandering end features a clever recap element, and we are left to wonder whether Martin will be capable of living up to his lofty ideals of research or whether the lure of his family -- and fame -- will ultimately win out in the end.
" ... Wandering on improbable trains between impossible towns."
" ... He saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a thousand truths far-off and doubtful."
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