SINCLAIR LEWIS has again taken a brief vacation from satirizing the various American types, which he pilloried so unmercifully in "Main Street," "Arrowsmith," and "Rabbitt" and written another amiable, un-irritative novel, comparable in spirit to "Mantrap."

The hero of the novel is Myron angle, as uninteresting a character as the Mr. Lewis has yet turned out. In this he burns an insatiable passion for the temptation of the Perfect American Inn, similar to the poet's dreams of writing the Perfect Poem. Myron is not a business man steeped in Babbittry, but a maniac whose fanaticism, tempered with practical vision and intelligence, carries him from his father's sleepy hostelry in Black Thread, Connecticut, to the top rank of the "Mine Hosts" of America. His vicissitudes in the course that progress constitute the thread the story, and Myron's whole life in 1897 to 1933 is bound up with his career as the slave of hospitality. His whole life is told in terms of hotels even his emotional experiences through his marriage (Effie May is totally devoid of color), and his musings are extricably bound up with ice water, phones in every room, and room service. The only variant note is struck the character of Ora Weagle, the higbrow and pseudo-poet, whose weakeness and essential meanness are so completely unredeemed by any winning ability that Mr. Lewis has all too little difficulty in convincing his readers that soul of the practical American is absolutely more worthy than that of the elitist. Such a tale was bound to be told of a one-track mind and therefore decidedly lacking in any subtlety of characterization.

The real interest of the book, however, lies not in the ups and downs of Myron Weagle, but in the setting, the vast panorama of American hospitality in 1897 down to the present day. Mr. Lewis has studied with his usual his subject and its settings, from "Westward Ho! Hotel" of New York in the early 1900's to Myron's new modern inn in Connecticut, not forgetting even the Tourist Camp of 1933. It still retains that splendid and vivid connectivity of description which characterized "Babbitt," and he has had the good fortune or the wisdom to choose a subject which has proved, in the "Imperial Palace" and in "Grand Hotel" that it is perennially intriguing.