Arrowsmith: Still Not Done
But here are some half-assed thoughts anyway.
Lewis’ style is like….it’s…put it this way, the sensation you get reading this is of a stoogie-clutching hand jabbing a square-tipped, callused index finger into your chest, kind of “Lemme tell you something, buddy —” I’ve never been hectored at for 70 solid pages, and to think there’s only 350+ more to go.
I can’t believe this dude won a Nobel. This is not his most famous work, and so maybe it’s simply not his best. But just for once I’d like to read an author in this little quest that didn’t seem to condescend to their characters. Lewis writes like a college sophomore discussing a high-school junior, there’s an undertone of “oh, aren’t you precious, and to think I used to be like that and take myself seriously.” All the characters are one-dimensional, which at least he has the balls to come out and admit. Still, I can sort of get an inkling of why this book might have seemed fresh and interesting when it came out — it is completely of its time, and thoroughly American. I mean, its descriptions of say, a frat house in a Midwestern University circa 1906 might seem a bit cliched today, down to the secret folder of test questions, but I’m thinking back in the 1920s Lewis was probably sketching out characters that hadn’t much appeared in literature before. Hell, the big midwestern colleges themselves only got started in the late 19th century. And he has a way—I’d hesitate before calling it a gift—with speech, and slang. His dialog is, if anything, more completely of its time than his descriptions, and reminds me in a way of Nabokov’s precise excerpts of Lolita’s “slangy speech,” which he uses so effortlessly to characterize her.
The trouble is, you don’t get much sense that Lewis even wants to poke below the surface. Even his main character, the doctor in training Martin Arrowsmith, you could sum up in a few words: Ambitious, impetuous, naive, blunt. And that seems to suffice for Lewis, because so far he doesn’t seem much interested in watching Arrowsmith mature but rather in using him as a living prop to illustrate what he takes to be the qualities of his time…
November 22, 2008 at 10:19 pm
I don’t know that I’ve ever read a more interminable novel, and I can’t say I would have pushed as far into it as I have (270ish pages!) without insisting that it be the only book that I carry with me and that I always stay on the local when I take the train. Even with those restrictions, I’ve still chosen to catnap over read even five more pages of Arrowsmith more often than not.
“Hectoring” is the perfect word for Lewis’s tone; I just want there to be a character in this book that he genuinely admires as an author and is willing to cut a freakin’ break. Maybe this is a really accurate portrait of a main character who consistently manages to render himself unlikeable.
Also, slang, even if captured accurately, does not age well. I can’t help but wonder if the author is prettying up dialogue that, in any age, would actually have been full of f-bombs. Otherwise, it’s like the line in The Music Man about “gee whiz” and “so’s your old man.”
February 5, 2010 at 5:26 am
Wow, we seem to have had incredibly similar experiences with this one! I certainly agree about the condescension, but also your comments about Lewis’s talent (which only made his failings all the more frustrating, for me). I don’t know that I’d agree, though, that Martin Arrowsmith is so one-dimensional. I thought there was more to him than any of the other characters (pretty much all of them flat and undeveloped), and I thought he therefore had an appeal, even a limited likeability. I didn’t get frustrated as early as you did, at least.
And I know what you mean about how most of these authors seem to condescend to their characters (though not Wharton, my one shining star and the reason I press onward with hope). Is this a consistent theme in 1920s literature, or are the Pulitzer Committee’s tastes steering us in this direction (and if so, why?)? I haven’t read enough outside of this Pulitzer quest to know if this is characteristic of the age or not.