{"id":1220,"date":"2011-11-11T21:09:18","date_gmt":"2011-11-12T05:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1220"},"modified":"2011-11-11T21:09:18","modified_gmt":"2011-11-12T05:09:18","slug":"review-elmer-gantry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1220","title":{"rendered":"Review: Elmer Gantry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sinclair Lewis has a real knack for creating characters without redeeming qualities that readers cannot look away from.\u00a0 Elmer Gantry is one of these, cut from the same cloth as George Babbit<\/a>, who has a brief cameo.\u00a0 Babbit is a realistic and depressing Middle American businessman, and Elmer Gantry is a realistic and depressing Middle American Evangelist.\u00a0 Gantry is, if anything, less introspective than Babbit, but Lewis compensates by making Elmer Gantry<\/em>‘s plot more exciting.<\/p>\n

At their core, the two books – and Main Street<\/em><\/a> for that matter – are very similar.\u00a0 They’re looks at singularly American people (and places) with a clear eye.\u00a0 Lewis isn’t a schoolmarm about this, though.\u00a0 While he clearly doesn’t approve of what his characters get up to, he’s got a sense of humor about it.\u00a0 And that sense of humor expresses itself in word play, the occasional joke, and some wicked backhanded irony.\u00a0 As deadpan ironist, Lewis has few peers.<\/p>\n

Lewis’s artistry and ironic distance make Gantry<\/em> palatable, even entertaining, but his critique of American evangelism is the central theme.\u00a0 The unique amalgam of marketing, showmanship, and politics that makes up Gantry’s world will be familiar to anyone watching evangelists in the 21st century.\u00a0 Though Gantry<\/em> is set almost a century ago, the fundamental tenets of American Evangelism remain largely unchanged. Lewis vividly depicts the cynicism and outright hypocrisy that seem to be prerequisites for success in this world.<\/p>\n

A satirical expose of unscrupulous clergy is interesting, but Gantry<\/em> is stronger than that.\u00a0 Despite all his larger-than-life transgressions, Gantry remains recognizably human.\u00a0 In fact, I easily identified with Gantry’s ambivalence that leads him to compromise after compromise until he has become something pretty awful.\u00a0 It is easy to see the lure of that road, even as I hope I’m not on it.\u00a0 And it is easy to see that Gantry can’t tell how far down the road to perdition he’s gone. He’s not self-aware enough to see where the sum of his decisions have taken him.\u00a0 I think he’s got plenty of company.<\/p>\n

While Lewis is a scathing critic of the hypocrites who seem to be the most successful, he does not ignore the good done by many of the cloth.\u00a0 In fact, even the worst clergy depicted have\u00a0 moments of decency and benevolence.\u00a0 He also draws out the range of belief in and out of the clergy itself.\u00a0 There is a lot to think about here.<\/p>\n

Strongly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sinclair Lewis has a real knack for creating characters without redeeming qualities that readers cannot look away from.\u00a0 Elmer Gantry is one of these, cut from the same cloth as George Babbit, who has a brief cameo.\u00a0 Babbit is a realistic and depressing Middle American businessman, and Elmer Gantry is a realistic and depressing Middle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1220"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1228,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1220\/revisions\/1228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}