God-Seeker [Paperback]

Sinclair Lewis (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Manor Books (January 1975)
• ISBN-10: 0532191048
• ISBN-13: 978-0532191049
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,320,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jesus as a "beautiful young God" of the Sioux", May 14, 2005

By 

T. Patrick Killough "All about Patrick" (Black Mountain, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: God-Seeker (Paperback)

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 durng 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 and bloviate, hunt and fish with men friends and other distractions. There is no happy compromise 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, 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.

Astonishly good, satiric, 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 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-