Books: Aaron Gadd

THE GOD-SEEKER (422 pp.)—Sinclair Lewis—Random House ($3.50).

Sinclair Lewis' new novel concerns Aaron Gadd, a carpenter by trade, who by a singular series of half-convictions, and somewhat to his own surprise, becomes a missionary to the Sioux Indians, A.D. 1848.

Aaron is a New England boy, raised in the Berkshires, "not tall nor short, with a brush of chestnut hair, and brown eyes that were serene and markedly friendly, his forehead noble and clear as a scholar's —or an actor's—only a fair dancer but a competent drinker." His dying grandfather, who had Episcopal leanings, was "a merry and evil old man who remembered...