The opening scenes of Dickens’ classic Oliver Twist are deliciously satirical. The poor urchin begins his life in a hellish orphanage, presided over by sadists espousing their heightened degree of Christian virtue in caring for such wicked youth. This is where his famous request for more gruel is made to the astonishment of his orphan compeers and the horror of his benevolent overlords. Unable to break such an indomitable demand for sustenance, the orphanage director apprentices Oliver out to a chimney sweeper who takes even less care for his wellbeing. It is funny, political, cutting, but then the novel turns towards more conventional storytelling: Oliver falls in with Fagin, a ringleader of child thieves, comes to live with an elderly benefactor, and finds out that he is really highborn. Also, a man falls off the edge of a roof and hangs himself after killing a whore. Not sure how they handle that one in the musical for kids.
My point being, in case it wasn’t readily discernible, is that satire is great but you can’t push it too far. At some point conventional storytelling ought to be given its place in the proceedings. Otherwise, you wind up with a novel like Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, a book clocking in at slightly fewer than 500 pages of pure satire. This is not to say that Gantry isn’t a good novel, an entertaining novel, and at times a spot-on critique of religious hypocrisy; my complaint is merely to say that it is exhausting. It is the book equivalent of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, except it is 100 days and the people don’t get their shit together in the end (yet even for all of that I would still rather read Gantry than rewatch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days). It is like binge-watching Mad Men or only reading The Onion for your news.
Gantry is the tale of the title character and his adventures from Philistine captain of a small Baptist college’s football team, to his emotional (and short-lived) conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, to his seminary days and expulsion therefrom, to his first pastorate and his deflowering of the deacon’s daughter, to his life on the road as a farm implement salesman, to his opening gig for a rockstar female evangelist, to his switch from Baptistical to Methodistical preaching at the behest of a savvy Methodist bishop and his rise from small town church to big town megastardom, to his crusade against all vice as he maintains a series of affairs with women of his flock, to his honorary degrees from institutions looking for money, to his eventual position as leader of a society for morals and pastorship of a large Methodist church in urban New York. If that was a breathfull to read, it gives you some idea of the scope of the novel as well as the character of the protagonist.
Elmer is a charlatan, pure and simple. He is not likeable or admirable or redeemable in any way. He is a terrible father, a cheating husband, and a minister who doesn’t believe in God. He is ambitious, which in some sort of Randian world I suppose would make him a hero. He uses his booming voice and physical presence to force weaker men into submission and cause weak-minded women to fall under his spell. He is everything you could ever want in a hypocritical preacher and Lewis spares no time thinking of ways to make Gantry anything other than simple and mean. On this score he succeeds brilliantly.
Which could be fine—often an unchanging main character around whom other characters experience revelations and deep change can make for a good story, but none of the other characters have added dimensionality. Elmer’s fellow priests are either like Elmer—ambitious, morally suspect, and theologically obtuse—or humble and thoughtful closeted atheists afraid to leave the church for lack of other skills, continuing the charade halfheartedly for the benefit of their congregation’s weak-minded opiate-of-the-masses consumers. The women in the book are completely powerless and ridiculously gullible. And that is the entire book.
There is no moral reckoning for Elmer, the story ending with him narrowly avoiding being exposed for his relationship with his secretary and he ends triumphant. Which, again, is fine. I like a sad ending to a sad tale, but the tale is paper thin. You can tell that Lewis spent time visiting Baptist churches and revivals in order to write the book, but you can also tell that he never really let himself experience these events. He was like one of the first anthropologists, smitten by how outlandish the conduct of people who believe different things than him appeared and reporting back to the likeminded about how they really are superior to those knuckle-draggers.
And this is the problem with satire: all too often it loses the humanity of the people it would castigate in its clever barbs. Christianity may condemn vice but it calls people to repentance and to a life of love. Satire only slings arrows, only has room for the already convinced, only seeks to tear down. This can be effective and has its place, but if you’re going to write a 500 page novel it would seem to that it ought to be populated with more than caricatures. This quality of the novel allows it to be easily dismissed by those who ought to hear its message. In other words, the moral depravity of England’s orphan system was conveyed to me in a far greater degree by the later life of Oliver Twist (which is really about the eighth best book by Dickens), than the state of religious hypocrisy was by Lewis’s unhinged screed.
When you abandon any sense of charity towards your characters, even the bad ones, you begin to treat them as subhuman. This makes one wonder what you think about real people in life who hold the same beliefs as those characters.
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