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THE GOD-SEEKER
by Sinclair Lewis (1949, 1975) two book reviews by T. Patrick Killough A. REVIEW for for http://www.barnesandnoble.com BOOK REVIEWED: The God-Seeker ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here is how your review will appear on the title page: Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), will soon visit Sinclair Lewis's Minnesota, May 14, 2005, REVIEW TITLE: Of God, Man and Minnesota REVIEW RATING: FIVE STARS * * * * * In 1927 Sinclair Lewis began a novel with the words, 'ELMER GANTRY was drunk,' In 1949 Sinclair Lewis introduced the future GOD- SEEKER, young Aaron Gadd, as experiencing 'Night in the dark New England hills, night and the winter stillness.' Aaron Gadd rescued runaway slaves, both as a boy in western Massachusetts and later as a crafstsmanlike carpenter and succesful building contractor in booming pre-Civil War St. Paul on the Minnesota frontier. He also created an in-house labor union and fought that union over his giving a runaway slave bricklayer a job. THE GOD-SEEKER is a fast paced tale of a young man's ambitious movement far to the west of St. Paul to test whether he has a mid 19th century vocation to be a Congregationalist missionary to the Sioux. Before he departs New England, he meets the exotic half-Sioux Selene Lanark, whose father runs a profitable Indian trading network on the frontier. Will Aaron's love for Selene deflect his life-long yearning for God or something at least God-like? It's worth reading the book to find out. For the history buff there is the geography and early history of Minnesota, especially from 1848 to 1855: its rivers, lakes, prairies, Chippewas, Dakotas (Sioux), voyageurs, dreamers, swindlers, politicians. We see the prairies and lakes achieve territorial status and move rapidly towards Statehood, as the Sioux cede their lands. The novel gives non-pompous attention to religion and its flowing narrative provides occasional stopping points and niches for quiet and not so quiet discussions of Calvinism, pre-millennialism, mysticism, the appeal of Jesus to the Sioux and on and on. Surprise piles on surprise. THE GOD-SEEKER is one of the best American novels which I have read in ages. Read it for its presentations of religion. Learn of the early Anglo-Catholic seminary at Nashotah, Wisconsin and the young (fictional) mystic whom it inspired to evangelize Indians. Read of the Sioux Black Wolf, educated at Oberlin College and his intuitive appreciation of Jesus whose humble life and heroic death made him very like a Sioux. The Protestant missionaries among the Sioux are, however, scorned by Black Wolf as 'sour and grasping zealots' who 'do not deserve a beautiful young God like Jesus' (Ch. 41). Aaron Gadd wants his headstone to read (Ch. 62) 'He built solid houses and paid pretty good, and if he didn't like it when the galoots went on strike, he didn't get all sore and sacred about it.' -OOO- Also recommended: Sinclair Lewis, ELMER GANTRY, THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK, FREE AIR, BABBITT, KINGSBLOOD ROYAL. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- B. Review for http://www.amazon.com The God-Seeker by Sinclair Lewis Here is your review the way it will appear: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ REVIEW TITLE: Jesus as a "beautiful young God" of the Sioux", REVIEW RATING OF NOVEL: Five Stars ***** May 14, 2005 Reviewer: T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States) - THE GOD-SEEKER (1949) is, in my opinion, the most under-rated of Sinclair Lewis's many novels. Contemporary critics treated this late work as if they were waiting for an aging Babe Ruth to break his own home run record once again in his final year at bat. Perhaps THE GOD-SEEKER lacks the wall-clearing oomph of ELMER GANTRY, but it is a solid inside the park home run by a master student of American evangelical religion. It is time for a publishing revival of THE GOD-SEEKER. For the novel is vintage Sinclair Lewis. Hero Aaron Gadd falls in love with two women at once during his career as a novice missionary among the Minnesota Sioux. He faces the recurring Sinclair Lewis "great decision:" to be single-minded (and probably celibate) in the pursuit of (in this instance "religious") greatness or instead to "play" with women as well as bloviate, hunt and fish with men friends and other distractions. There is no happy compromising with any man's call to any form of greatness. The story moves quickly from one scene to another: with Aaron Gadd a youth in rocky New England, coming of age on the wild Minnesota frontier, maturing into a solid, sometimes avant garde citizen of Territorial Minnesota. And then there is made-in-America religion throughout: churches and fads of the late 1840s: cultists, American nudists, free thinkers, Calvinists and anti-Calvinists, theologians and American pulpit glory seekers. The book is worth reading for its serious, humorous and satirical portrayals of religion if for no other reason. Astonishingly good, biting, often true, deeply tragic is chapter 41 in which "I, Black Wolf, son of Shining Wind, of the Wahpeton Council Fire, being a pure-blood Dakota and a member of the medicine lodge, but having attended a school of the white people [NOTE: OBERLIN COLLEGE], am herewith warning my people...." against the white invaders and their superstitions. To this patriotic Sioux, the Catholic Trinity is Father, Son and Mother Mary. "The Protestants have no trinity, but a four-god council consisting of Father, Son, Holy Spirit and Satan." White people's demigods include Santa Claus, witches, vampires and spirits of the dead. This is cross-cultural humor verging on the intoxicated (which Black Wolf sometimes was). But Jesus by contrast was a brave, poor, humble "beautiful young god" whom the Sioux can easily worship. THE GOD-SEEKER is not on film, is not one of the 25 known movie or TV adaptations of a Lewis novel or short story. But it should be. It tells one person''s life from boyhood to a religious mission, to service to slaves and the poor, to mastery of a craft, to marriage and fatherhood. And it presents many snapshots of American religious leaders, real and fictional. The novel abounds with the religious texture of America, mainly northern but also southern in one or two cases. At the close of Ch. 16, One of the youthful Aaron Gadd's Massachusetts pastoral mentors left this advice somewhere deep forever in Aaron's memory: "Our forebears ought to of loved the Baptists, but they drove 'em out. If you ever get to be a minister, Aary, you love wrong Christians just as much as you love right Christians. The shadow of the same cross falls on both of them." THE GOD-SEEKER is studded with descriptions, aphorisms, debates and humor which thoroughly deserve new readers. -OOO- TPK black mountain, nc May 14, 2005 revisited November 17, 2005/revisited July 31, 2006 |