July 2009 Fiction Book Club Selection

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Product Description

The portrait of an evangelist who rises to power within his church.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #657781 in Books
• Published on: 1967-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Review
Novel by Sinclair Lewis, a satiric indictment of fundamentalist religion that caused an uproar upon its publication in 1927. The title character of Elmer Gantry starts out as a greedy, shallow, philandering Baptist minister, turns to evangelism, and eventually becomes the leader of a large Methodist congregation. Throughout the novel Gantry encounters fellow religious hypocrites, including Mrs. Evans Riddle, Judson Roberts, and Sharon Falconer, with whom he becomes romantically involved. Although he is often exposed as a fraud, Gantry is never fully discredited. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

From AudioFile
Lewis's classic story of a corrupt and cynical evangelical preacher would seem torn from the pages of current newspapers if the dialogue weren't surprisingly dated. Elmer Gantry is charismatic without being likable, which makes voicing him a tricky business for Anthony Heald. His Elmer is an ambitious, self-righteous sociopath, whose timbre betrays no trace of conscience, self-doubt, regret, or sympathy for others, even at the beginning of his career. Heald's pacing, his accents, his narrative drive are all excellent, although his women tend to sound the same, mostly breathy, credulous ninnies. It may be that that's all there was on the page, but with no character growth in sight, the dispiriting effect is of one jarring note overwhelming the music from beginning to end. B.G. 2009 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

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Customer Reviews

Talented scoundrel takes to the pulpit
Elmer Gantry begins this novel as a boozing, womanizing, college football player. Despite having a great speaking voice and dominating personality he has no interest in persuing a career as a minister. Peer pressure leads him to try, and he soon finds himself attending divinity school and headed to life as a man of the cloth.

Elmer's character can be summed up by once incident. After getting a doubt-ridden professor fired, someone leaves 30 dimes wrapped in a religious tract in Elmer's dorm room. He delightedly mines the tract for sermon ideas, and uses the 30 dimes to buy naughty postcards.

Besides following the rise, fall, and rise of hard working, talented, and utterly unprincipled Elmer, Sinclair Lewis's novel shows us the state of evangelical religion in the first decades of the 20th Century. We see back-country Baptist churches, traveling revival shows, "New Age" cults, and middle-of-the road Methodist congregations at work.

It's funny, and hair-raising, stuff. There's also a nice twist ending that puts it in the category of an Awful Warning novel.

A penetrating look at a hypocritical preacher
In Babbit, Sinclair Lewis turns business into a religion. Whereas, in Elmer Gantry, Lewis turns religion into a business. Elmer Gantry is a very real portrayal of a man who is ecstatic about his religion, but it is all an outward show for profit. We might be tempted to think that the corruption evident in modern televangelists is a new occurence. Lewis proves us wrong. Lewis shows the entire spectrum of christian belief in this novel from hypocrisy, to agnosticism, to an abiding spiritual life. Despite the fact that Lewis is one of my favorite authors and this is a superior novel, there was one disappointment. Near the end of the book, Gantry is confronted by the book's one genuine believer. There was a lot of emotional tension in the scene, and I felt Lewis just let it slip away. It was an unsatisfying resolution after the build up. Beyond that one moment, It's one of the best works of fiction I have ever read.

Ageless portrayal of the rise of a hypocrite
A lot of Sinclair Lewis can be read as social history in our days at the turn of the 21st century. Social mores and the whole tenor of society have changed dramatically since the days of his major works. But ELMER GANTRY still reads like a story of our times. Though it covers a period roughly stretching from 1902 to 1926, and America has been transformed since then, the basic idea of the novel---how a man, selfish, ignorant, bullying, and posing as a 'regular guy', can fool most of the people most of the time---is still very much relevant to us. Business was the heart of America in Lewis' day, and it still is. But a career model drawn from that sphere could be used in many other walks of life. ELMER GANTRY is about a man who uses religion and a Protestant church to rise socially, to get and abuse power for his own ends. From Elmer's evangelical college days with his drinking, womanizing, total lack of ability or interest in studies, and his lying and maneuvering to get what he wants, to the stunning but realistic conclusion to the book, Lewis paints a vibrant portrait of an unprincipled climber ; a man who will change any opinion, betray anybody, and do anything to get ahead. If we consider the sagas of TV evangelists in our days, the difference between their revealed hypocrisies and those written by Lewis is startlingly small. The sole difference was that in the 1920s, there was no television for Elmer Gantry to exploit.

Certain sections of the book read better than others--it is not of uniform quality---and sometimes you wonder why Lewis inserted a chapter here or there. I think particularly of the two chapters on the fate of Frank Shallard, Gantry's alter-ego. They seemed to be an afterthought, and the point was brutally taken, but for what purpose other than shock ? On the other hand, Lewis' use of the colloquial language of the times and inclusion of thousands of minor details of life in that era reveal a whole world which might, in the absence of ELMER GANTRY, have disappeared from our consciousness. On the whole, this is a powerful novel about an unscrupulous, offensive scoundrel which still resonates well in our day. The Gantrys of this world are endless. Unfortunately.