Elmer Gantry

Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry is an excellent expose of hypocrisy in the United States during the early twentieth century. While Lewis focuses on the life of a hypocritical preacher, the Dr. Rev. Mr. Elmer Gantry, he also pans out wider to critique American society.

Much of the story follows Elmer Gantry who was a drunk, a football player, and a prolific fornicator during his early years in college. Through a series of mishaps and accidental encounters he finds himself drawn into the ministry and becomes an ordained Baptist minister. Throughout the novel Elmer Gantry cannot reconcile his puerile and lascivious habits with his calling to serve God and save the masses. Lewis consistently juxtaposes Gantry's many vices—drunkenness, adultery, assault, greed, and pride—with Gantry's "war on vice" when he elevates through the ranks in the Methodist church. The two sides of his personality are reciprocal because just as Elmer Gantry indulges in adultery he escalates his attack on adultery from the pulpit. In that way Lewis tries to get us inside the mind of a hypocrite, a man who seldom perceives his own flaws but persistently flaunts his pride in every face-to-face encounter. One who serves his congregation to gain influence and power and to curse those who pester him once they leave his office. A man who abuses his wife for her sexual frigidity (or perhaps provokes such frigidity), but knows that he needs his wife, Cleo, to win the trust of more respectable parishioners.

Gantry's character was emblematic of the American spirit during the period, as Lewis sees it. Those who were honest and expressed their doubts with spiritual and religious matters were ostracized at best and beaten by thugs at worst. Those who rose to power during the 1910s and 1920s exploited the prohibition era and the dissonance between traditionalists and modernists to their advantages. Just as Gantry's career takes a meteoric rise on his various vice-slaying campaigns, those around him who lead honest lives are crushed under his foot.

Success comes from "being all things to all people at all times." Gantry wages his war on vice in his appeal to the "ignorant masses" and the "respectable people" that attend his revivals and church service and simultaneously preaches capitalism, exploitation of the poor and union busting when he tries to persuade the urbane rich to invest in his ministry. If one thing is certain, it's that one cannot discern authenticity during a time when even Gantry's golf coach learned his affected Scottish accent from an Irishman.

This is a great book, and I would highly recommend the Audible version narrated by Anthony Heald. Heald is an outstanding voice actor and brings Elmer Gantry and the ensemble to life in a way that even the film could not capture.

Elmer Gantry is sporadically fascinating and engaging - the first third of the novel flies by as you are immersed in the many character flaws of a spiritual huckster.

Eventually, the book became very easy to put down, however. Gantry begins as a carousing atheist undergraduate rebelling against his conservative Christian roots. It's not long, though, before he discovers his gift for oration will most easily satisfy his tremendous ambitions if put to use in the pulpit.

And the spoiler bit follows:


The reason the novel ultimately disappoints, is that Gantry is correct. Being vindicated in his early discovery, that one could be preacher and spiritual adviser as a means merely to enrich and increase status, leaves little room for growth of Gantry. The arc of the novel becomes the exterior success of the main character, touching little on the internal growth of the 'protagonist'. Elmer could be a great literary antihero, if only he had evolved a bit through the process of succeeding.

I'm left thinking I may have picked the wrong Sinclair Lewis; the writing itself is quite good. Sorry that my main criticism is ultimately a spoiler. I'm tempted to rate it lower due to this criticism, but cannot because the end result is a pretty scathing commentary on American culture of the 1920's that remains relevant today.