Stoner: John Williams (1965)

These days the word Stoner has a certain connotation, but William Stoner, the protagonist in John Williams’ novel is a staid, dare I say it … plodder. Playing my alternate title game with this book, it would be Downer.

William Stoner, the only child of a dirt-poor, hard-working Missouri farming couple, does not think of his life beyond the daily drudgery of the farm, but one day, a County agent approaches his father regarding sending William to the state university to study agriculture. This will be a hardship for the family, but Stoner’s father makes the decision that his son should attend. There’s no sense of ambition behind the decision, but more the sense that it might ‘be a good thing.’ In 1910, Stoner, equipped with the bare minimum is taken via mule-wagon by his parents to the nearest town, and then he walks to the university. He is given a ride in a wagon for part of the way and finds himself in a whole new world. He boards at the farm of his mother’s cousin, another dirt poor couple, and he pays for his room and board by working on the farm.

Stoner is an average student until he walks into a required English Literature class taught by Archer Sloane, and it’s in this class that Stoner finds a deep love for literature. He switches his major, learns Greek and Latin, and eventually, encouraged by Archer Sloane he enrolls in a PhD programme. Somewhere along the way he meets Edith, the only child of a banker. He may fall in love, but there’s a whiff of last chance in Edith’s acceptance. The novel follows Stoner’s life, and what a miserable life he has. On one hand it’s a story of tremendous success–a story of how a man’s life is transformed by education, and yet it’s a story of loneliness, a bitter marriage, university backstabbing politics and moral failure. Stoner is part of the great American tradition of the misunderstood, underappreciated, overworked American male crushed by the often neurotic social climbing women in his life. That’s not a slam, but there is a such a sub-genre. Thinking Dodsworth here.

Set from 1910 until 1956, the book serves as a tableau of American history –we see WWI, Prohibition, The Great Depression, WWII, the Korean war and McCarthyism like a moving picture all taking place outside of the sheltered world of the university.

This is also a campus novel, so we see Stoner’s steady but plodding academic career, and he’s no match for the more politically savvy university employees. Stoner’s contemporary, Gordon Finch is the quintessential political animal, a man whose personality guarantees he will float to the top. Stoner has an arch enemy in Professor Hollis Lomax, and long standing hatred brews in the English Department (as it so often does). Stoner, as a professor is reliable, steady, and has principles–rather expensive principles as Stoner learns. For this reader, the depictions of university life are the best aspects of the novel: the petty squabbles, using students as a battleground, the silent politics of appointments, the tyranny of tenure. Oddly, the descriptions of the campus are the best (non-depressing) descriptions in the book.

His sense of time was displaced. He found himself standing in the long parquet first floor corridor of Jesse Hall. A low hum like the distant thrumming of birds’ wings was in his ears.In the shadowed corridor, a sourceless light seemed to glow and dim, pulsating like the beat of his heart, and his flesh, intimately aware of every move he made, tingled as he stepped forward with deliberate care into the mingled light and dark. He stood at the stairs that led up to the second floor. The steps were marble and in their precise centers were gentle troughs worn smooth by decades of footsteps going up and down. They had been almost new when, how many years ago, he had first stood here and looked up. As he looked now, and wondered where they would lead him, he thought of time and its gentle flowing. He put one foot carefully on the first smooth depression and lifted himself up.

The narrative of Stoner (which is all tell and no show) tends towards depressing descriptions. Here he is thinking about his dead parents:

He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been–a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.

Stoner is well-worth reading and is considered an “American masterpiece.” It is, however, somewhat problematic. As a protagonist, Stoner is passive. He’s not a man of action; he’s worked on and against more than anything else. He accepts whatever is dealt to him–his wife’s antagonism is a great example. She vomits the first time they have sex, but later when she decides she wants a child, she turns into a bedroom nympho which seemed more like a male fantasy than anything else. Eternally discontent, her nomadic neuroticism initially manifests as an ongoing cleaning campaign but later she drifts from one hobby to another. She mostly ignores their only child, Grace, until she can weaponise the child against Stoner. Edith is the mistress of covert, malicious domestic warfare. Stoner comes home from work one day to find that his office is stripped so that Edith can work on her watercolors (a long abandoned hobby). His books desk etc are shoved in the unheated sun room. Later, children are allowed to play in the room, so many of his papers (for a second book) are trashed. Upon another occasion, a window is broken and items ruined, so Stoner, accepting defeat, moves his work, his books, to the college campus. At home, he sleeps on the couch.

There are three female characters in the novel: Edith, Grace and Ann. Edith and Grace both have mental health issues, and Ann seems a male fantasy created to feed Stoner’s unacknowledged ego. We only get Stoner’s version of his depressing long-suffering life with Edith, a woman who has the emotional maturity of 12. I wanted him to pick up a chair and break it or something–anything to end the tyranny of her personality. In every relationship Stoner is passive, but ever stoic, with increasingly stooped shoulders, he bears up like Atlas under the burden of his woes. The only time he drops his timidity is when he’s defending his position at the university, but even that takes years. Stoner is a downer. You really wouldn’t want to follow this with, let’s say, Jude the Obscure.

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Ghosts: Edith Wharton

As the evenings lengthen, it’s the perfect time for ghost stories. Edith Wharton is not a name I typically associate with spooky tales, but here’s a collection of ghost stories from New York Review Classics. Some are ghost stories certainly, perhaps the most famous being The Lady Maid’s Bell, but others focus on the psychological. Many of the stories bring up the question as to whether ghosts are real or if events, as related, can be believed. I tend to think of ghosts being specific to certain locations; restless spirits who haunt houses or castles, perhaps reliving tragic events that are permanently imprinted in the fabric of the universe. Most, but not all, of the stories here follow the ‘residual haunting’ model, and when it comes to resident ghosts, it seems that people either love to discuss them, or clam up when the subject comes up for discussion. The contents:

All Souls’
The Eyes
Afterward
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell

Kerfol
The Triumph of Night
Miss Mary Pask
Bewitched
Mr Jones
Pomegranate Seed
The Looking Glass

The narrator in All Souls’ tells a story about her cousin, Sara Clayburn. Sara, now a widow, lives in a large, isolated 18th century house called Whitegates. The house “seemed remote and lonely to modern servants,” but Sara “inherited,” from her mother-in-law, a couple of long-employed servants. It was thought, once Sara became a widow, that she would move from Whitegates, but the house had been in her husband’s family for years, and so she remained. One October, while out walking at dusk, Sara passed a woman who said she was on her way to the house to see “one of the girls.” Harmless enough… but on the way back to the house, Sara fell and injured her ankle. The doctor makes a visit and cautions bed rest, planning to return in 2 days time. Then a curious thing happens–a servant brings food and a thermos of tea. Sara orders it to be removed but the maid leaves the food and exits the room.

The next day, when the servants don’t appear, Sara finds herself in a completely deserted house. All the servants have disappeared. … I really liked this story but found the ending unsatisfying.

The Eyes is rather intriguing. In this tale, 8 men gather and exchange ghost stories. The curmudgeonly Andrew Culwin, who believes that “all men were superfluous and women necessary because someone had to do the cooking,” surprises the rest of the company when he claims to have seen two ghosts.

Afterward is the story of a married couple, Mary and Edward Boyne, who on the hunt for an ancient British mansion, buy a place in Dorsetshire called Lyng. There’s talk bandied about concerning the resident ghost but the Boynes think this is all part of the fun. The Boynes move into Lyng and Mary notices that Edward begins to change. Mary becomes convinced that the house is indeed haunted.

The Lady’s Maids’ Bell is a classic ghost story, and rather a good one, for if we ask if ghosts exist, and answer in the affirmative (or unsure) then the next question, surely, would be: under what circumstances do they appear? Back to the resident ghost, and ghosts that are locked to location, have some unfinished business, or cannot rest. The Lady’s Maid’s Bell fits all those categories.

Kerfol also fits into those categories, but the setting is different and the ghosts are dogs. Here the ghosts are also locked to location, and it’s a location where terrible events are permanently imprinted on the area. This is a tale of a brutish 17th century man who ruled over his home, Kerfol, in Brittany. Kerfol is now for sale (imagine why?), and the narrator goes to take a look at it:

Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the present. As it stood there, lifting its proud roof and gables to the sky, it might have been its own funeral monument.

Mr. Jones is the story of Lady Jane, a woman who unexpectedly inherits Bells, a house that has been in the family for centuries. Lady Jane has spent her life travelling, but when she sees Bells, she falls in love with the place.

A silence distilled from years of solitude lay on lawns and gardens. No one had lived at Bells since the last Lord Thudeney, then a penniless younger son, had forsaken it sixty years before to seek his fortune in Canada.

Although the house has not been occupied by an owner for years, servants continue to live there. Right away there are two mysteries. The first mystery concerns the identity of a family retainer known as Mr. Jones who rules the house and the servants with an iron rod. The second mystery concerns a long-dead Viscountess. Lady Jane visits the on-grounds chapel with its monuments of long dead ancestors, and here she sees a sarcophagus of a Viscount:

“Born on May 1st, 1790, perished of the plague at Aleppo in 1828” and underneath in small cramped characters as if crowded as an afterthought into an insufficient space: “Also his Wife.” That was all, no name, dates, honours, epithets, for the Viscountess Thudeney. Did she, too, die of the plague at Aleppo? Or did the ‘also’ imply her actual presence in the sarcophagus?

I shan’t discuss all the stories, but will say that the collection offers a range of well-worth reading variations on the ghost story.
review copy

The Spectator Bird: Wallace Stegner (1976)

“At our age, news is all bad. I don’t like standing in line for the guillotine.”

It’s the 1970s, and 69-year-old, retired literary agent Joe Allston lives with his wife Ruth near Palo Alto, California. Their only son, Curtis died years earlier while surfing, maybe an accident, maybe not, and now Joe and Ruth live a quiet life. Joe, “irritable and depressed,” is pushed by his wife into gathering together all of the papers and notes from his career in order to write a memoir:

The writers I represented left their monuments, consequential or otherwise. I might have done the same if I had not, at the bottom of the Depression, been forced to chose whether I would be a talent broker or a broke talent. I drifted into my profession as a fly lands on flypaper, and my monument is not in the libraries, or in men’s minds, or even in the paper-recycling plants, but in those files. They are the only thing that prove I ever existed.

Joe who sees himself as a “wise cracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people and a tourist in his own,” has many regrets about his life; he feels as though he’s been a “spectator bird” and “that there had not been one significant event in life he planned.” As Joe mulls over the dullness of his life and the road that brought him to this point, a postcard arrives from Astrid, a Danish countess the Allstons met during a holiday decades earlier. The postcard revives old memories and Joe digs out a journal he kept of the trip. The trip to Denmark was partly for Joe to investigate his roots and discover exactly why his mother left Denmark, setting sail for America at age 16. The trip is also an escape from the guilt and regrets over their estranged son’s death. While the holiday should be restorative, it becomes an unsettling Jamesian exploration of the Innocent American Abroad.

Joe narrates The Spectator Bird, and when the novel opens, it’s clear that Joe is obsessed with aging and dying. This state of affairs isn’t helped by the fact that a neighbour is dying of cancer, or that Ruth visits the local care home and encourages Joe to do the same. Then on top of that, another neighbour, an elderly doctor who is falling apart slowly but still manages to put a brave face on it, harasses Joe about his morbid frame of mind.

I had been sitting on the old timbers for about ten minutes when Ben Alexander drove in from the county road in his convertible. His top was down, his hair was tangled, and he had Edith Patterson in the seat beside him, looking like a racoon in her wraparound Hollywood shades. It was all so young and gay and California that I had to laugh. Ben is the very chief of the tribe that makes old age out to be a time of liberation. He is writing a book about it.

Ben and Ruth can see that Joe is having a miserable time aging, and they both have strategies, which always fail, to shake Joe from this frame of mind. The result is that Ruth has become more of a mother to Joe–so much so that he keeps her at arm’s length emotionally as he struggles with regrets and aging. Poor Ruth, who likes to air all emotions, has the patience of a saint. We see Joe in the present day, uncomfortable in a shifting social environment, reluctant to be around young people as they remind him of what he’s lost. He wonders if they notice him, and at the same time when he learns of a neighbour’s imminent demise he can’t confront the reality of death and instead finds it easier to pretend all is normal.

Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window.

The book goes back and forth between 1970s California and Joe’s reading of the 1954 journal which Ruth insists be read aloud after she spies it in Joe’s hands. Joe does so with some reluctance as it reveals both his state of mind at the time and some rather unsavoury events that took place.

All too often authors use journals from the past or an unexpected postcard as a cheap segue into the past. Here the past and the present are perfectly and skillfully blended as we see Joe in his 40s and Joe decades later farther down the road as he faces old age. This is an incredibly introspective novel, told from Joe’s often morbid view, and that morbid view, particularly striking on the subject of age, is alleviated by Joe’s self-deprecating humour. Since this is Joe’s story, Ruth is an appendage–the little woman in the background and while she sighs a lot at Joe’s attitude to life, we never really get to know her. But then I don’t think Joe knows her either. … I can’t imagine that they had much of an emotional life together. It can’t have been easy being married to Joe. I listened to the audio book version which was beautifully read by Edward Herrmann, but unfortunately Ruth’s voice comes across as simpering.

But apart from those criticisms, I loved this book and enjoyed it far more than I expected to. This is a sombre examination of the life of one ordinary man–nothing heroic in his past, no great deeds, but as he ages and sees that nothing of him will remain after his death, he is full of regrets. This is a man whose choices were inseparable from, and seminal to, his character.

My commitments are often more important than my impulses or my pleasures, and that even when my pleasures or desires are the principal issue. There are choices to be made between better and worse, bad and better good and good, but why cry over it twenty years later? Because in every choice there is a component maybe a big component, of pain .

 

The Good House: Ann Leary

“I get so paranoid when I drink; that’s what AA and rehab will do for you.”

The funny, tart voice of a stubborn, alcoholic woman (in denial) as she careens though her life makes The Good House the most entertaining, funny and surprising book I’ve read in a long time.

Divorced 60-year-old real estate agent Hildy Good is one of Wendover’s most successful businesswomen. Wendover, located on Boston’s North shore, is a strange blend of legacy residents (Hildy can trace her family back to the Salem witch trials) and new money incomers who are looking for a better quality life for their children. Hildy capitalizes on local news (and gossip) to land listings and sales. So what if she drinks too much. That’s her business isn’t it? And her life was going great, wasn’t it, until her two adult daughters arranged an intervention, and Hildy went off to rehab.

When we meet Hildy, she’s out of rehab, back at work, but listings and sales are dropping. A former employee, “with all sorts of liposuctioning and flesh tucking,” is her biggest competitor and Hildy’s stint in rehab may have allowed the competitor an edge that Hildy is now desperately chasing. With a mortgage she can’t really afford, and still paying for therapy (and more) for her two daughters, Hildy is squeezed to the max.

Hildy, our unreliable narrator, is in control of what we see, but even so through the denial, the cracks show. At rehab, she didn’t think she belonged, but she completed the programme in order to get her daughters off her back and so that she could see her grandson.

How could anyone, besides my ridiculous, ungrateful spoiled daughters, imagine that I had a problem with alcohol?

She used to drink with a friend, but now that she is supposedly dry, she drinks alone on the sly. She has ‘rules’ about drinking, and she keeps a secret stash in the cellar where no one will find it. She likes herself more when she’s drunk, and thinks alcohol enables her success. Over the course of the novel, her relationship with alcohol becomes more and more problematic. Whether she’s driving drunk, experiencing blackouts, or sneaking vodka at family holidays, Hildy’s life is out-of-control.

While the novel is ostensibly about Hildy’s alcoholism, other characters in Hildy’s life drag her into various problems. Rebecca, a beautiful, troubled, wealthy newcomer becomes friends with Hildy–drinking friends, and so we see how alcohol impairs Hildy’s judgement and how it impacts her emotional responses. Then there’s Hildy’s long-cold romance with Frank Getchell, a local bachelor with desirable legacy property, who makes a rather lucrative living collecting trash and doing various construction jobs. At yet another remove, we see how Hildy functions in a community where everyone knows everyone’s secrets, and the locals who used to own the big properties are now lucky if they can get a job working for the new owners.

Hildy is always an entertaining narrator whether she’s complaining about a fellow dinner guest using any excuse to talk about her “annoying writing,” or bitching about a rival grandmother:

Honestly, if she hadn’t had my grandchild in her arms, I would have clocked her on the head. Could she have been more obnoxious about Grady? I’ve never liked Nancy Watson. She’s a nitwit. When not watching Grady, she’s busy “scrapbooking,” which is her hobby, and Tess is always showing me the sickly-sweet scrapbooks featuring Grady that Nancy puts together, seemingly every week. I always smile as Tess flips the pages for me, and I say things like “Imagine having all that time to devote to something like this.”

The Good House is consistently funny from the first page until the end. Hildy always surprised me with just how far she was prepared to go. She’s dug down so deep in denial that there were numerous occasions when I was deceived, and either laughed out loud at the consequences or shock my head in concern. Unreliable narrator, psychiatry and real estate are all buttons for me.

I was sorry to finish this novel, and sorry to say goodbye to Hildy–a woman who’s extremely capable, someone who has an uncanny knack at ‘reading’ people but who is blind to herself. At one point she brags to local psychiatrist:

I can walk through a house once and know more about its occupants than a psychiatrist could after a year of sessions.

According to Hildy:

I like a house that looks lived in. General wear and tear is a healthy sign; a house that’s too antiseptic speaks as much to me of domestic discord as a house in complete disarray. Alcoholics, hoarders, binge eaters, addicts, sexual deviants, philanderers, depressives–you name it, I can see it all in the worn edges of their nests. You catch the smoky reek of stale scotch and cigarettes despite the desperate abundance of vanilla-scented candles. The animal stench up between the floorboards, even though the cat lady and her minions were removed months before, the marital bedroom that’s become his, the cluttered guest room that’s more clearly hers--well you get the idea. 

Finally, beyond the entertainment factor there’s real quality here. Hildy’s youth is seen in shimmering, poignant flashbacks, and it’s really really well done.

TBR list

(There’s a film of this book in production. I would have preferred to have seen a miniseries–thinking Big Little Lies)

My Mortal Enemy: Willa Cather (1926)

“We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeletons.”

Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy, a story of an unhappy marriage and the bitterly unhappy woman who gave up a fortune for love, is reminiscent of both Edith Wharton and Henry James. In this instance, our Jamesian narrator is Nellie, a teenage girl when this novella opens, and the story follows Nellie’s observations of an older woman over the course of three meetings that take place during a ten-year period.

Nellie has heard so much about Myra Henshawe, and to Nellie, Myra’s life is swathed in romance. Nellie’s mother and Aunt Lydia were friends with Myra Henshawe (Myra Driscoll as she was known), and they all grew up in the small southern Illinois town of Parthia. Myra lived with her wealthy uncle, and she was his heir, but everything derailed when Myra eloped with Oswald Henshawe against her uncle’s express wishes. Myra married Oswald knowing that she would be completely disinherited

When 15-year-old Nellie first meets Myra, the young impressionable girl already has images of romance in her head, and those ideas evaporate when she meets the flesh-and-blood woman who is now plump, matronly and 45 years old. Myra and her husband live in New York, and while they are affectionate towards each other, there are sinewy troubling undercurrents in their marriage. Nellie who finds Myra “perplexing,” is disturbed by the meeting and her observations, and yet Nellie is too young to process what she sees. Myra has a way of taking control of every situation by making unsettling comments. Nellie notes that “it was like being touched by a metal so cold that one didn’t know whether one is burned or chilled.”

“How good it is,” my mother exclaimed, “to hear Myra laugh again!”

Yes it was good. It was sometimes terrible, too, as I was to find out later. She had an angry laugh, for instance, that I still shiver to remember. Any stupidity made Myra laugh–I was destined to hear that one very often! Untoward circumstances, accidents, even disasters provoked her mirth. And it was always mirth, not hysteria; there was a spark of zest and wild humour in it.  

A second meeting with the Henshawes occurs shortly afterwards, and this meeting takes place when Nellie and her Aunt Lydia travel to New York. This visit yields more glimpses into the Henshawes’ marriage. There are tensions, hints of unhappiness, and Myra’s extravagances (which Oswald comments on but can’t curb).

During this visit, Oswald makes a strange request of Aunt Lydia regarding a pair of cufflinks. This is a fascinating section of this short, finely structured novella, for the incident seems to make Myra, at least in Aunt Lydia’s eyes, even more unreasonable, but there very well could be a deeper story about the cufflinks.

The Henshawes’ apartment was the second floor of an old brownstone house on the north side of the Square. I loved it from the moment I entered it; such solidly built, high-ceiled rooms, with snug fire-places and wide doors and deep windows. The long, heavy velvet curtains and the velvet chairs were a wonderful plum-colour, like ripe purple fruit. The curtains were lined with that rich cream-colour that lies under the blue skin of ripe figs.

I’ve included that quote simply because it is so beautifully evocative.

The final meeting takes place ten years later when Nellie is 25 and Myra is 55. I shan’t say more of the novel as to detail the meeting would give away too much of the plot.

For this reader, My Mortal Enemy encapsulates the mysteries and subtle politics of marriage.  Clearly Myra and Oswald loved each other once, and Myra made a tremendous sacrifice to be with him. Does she regret it? Did she make the right choice? Would she have been any happier if she’d turned away her impoverished suitor and kept the money and the mansion? Are we human beings, flawed as we are, capable of forgiving someone for letting us sacrifice? And then there’s the incident of the cuff links, and Myra’s bits of hidden money.

Aunt Lydia seems hard on Myra and I don’t think that’s totally fair. It’s impossible (unless there’s gross misbehaviour) to untangle the knotty threads of a marriage.

Light and silence: they heal all wounds–all but one, and that is healed by dark and silence. 

TBR stack

Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara

“Joe was like a young fellow that never grew up. In many respects that was what he was. But if you let it end there, you wouldn’t have the full picture of the man. I can’t believe that what I was allowed to see of Joe was all there was. If that was all there was, he was a dull man, perhaps a stupid man.”

Joe Chapin is the main character of John O’ Hara’s Ten North Frederick. There’s nothing really special about Joe, and he would have been a very average man if not for his inherited wealth. Born into the privilege that always cocooned him and also denied some fundamental, necessary experiences, he attended law school, married and had two children. He was a good husband, a good father, and as a conservative, he was also a lifelong member of the Republican Party. He never travelled to Europe, didn’t fight in a World War, but he did have political ambitions which grew, almost preposterously, from his innate sense of self-worth. In many ways it’s a small life, and it’s definitely a sad life. From early childhood, Joe was conditioned to act a certain way, think a certain way, and only mingle with certain types of people. Joe was a man who never stepped out of line–except once, and that incident led to his permanent unhappiness.

Ten North Frederick is the address of Joe’s home–an old mansion in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. This was also Joe’s parents’ home; Joe was born in the house, and he died there. He obeyed his family’s wishes to keep the family home in spite of the fact that it wasn’t the most elite address in Gibbsville, because the best families–not the richest or the most fashionable–lived in that section of town, and even Joe’s address said a great deal about the sort of man he was.  We could say that Joe was defined by external markers rather than internal. Joe was, in fact, a rather hollow person.

The novel’s focus is on the hypocrisy of small-time American life. In the introduction, written by Jonathan Dee in my Penguin Classics edition, Dee argues that O’Hara’s work is primed for a renaissance. He states that the novel is “pitilessly accurate” in “freezing the details of a bygone era in American history,” and citing the 2008 financial clash, that the novel blasts “the great American fairy tale of class mobility.” One of my pet beliefs is that no one writes as well about the excesses of wealth and the tentacles of selective power than Americans, and Ten North Frederick, surely one of the giants of 20th century American literature bolsters my argument. O’Hara’s style is heavy & ponderous–think Dreiser.

The novel begins with Joe’s funeral, and then the narrative expands with various pallbearers’ versions of Joe. A picture begins to form of the man who was the epitome of conformity, but then O’Hara moves in closer to see Joe through family members, and cracks begin to appear in the image we have until, by the end of the book, the vision we have of Joe and his life is of a big blank hemmed in and defined by conformity. Joe moved in a circle of influential people who all thought like him, shared the same values and beliefs, and rarely, if ever, stepped outside of their comfort zone.

In Gibbsville, in 1909, only a few men could tell with exactness the true wealth of the wealthy Gibbsville families. A family that had assets worth $800,000 could, and usually did, live in great comfort without spending much more money than a family worth $200,00. It was a matter of pride with the best people of Gibbsville to live comfortably, but without the kind of display that would publicly reveal the extent of their wealth. A few families, whose names were given to large holdings in coal lands and to breweries and meat-packing houses, lived in American luxury. They were the owners of the early motor cars. they employed the larger staff of servants. They had summer homes at distant resorts and led the lists of contributors to church and charity. Their wealth was a known fact and they were free to enjoy it. But behind them, obscured by the known wealthy, were the well-off, who possessed considerable fortunes and who quietly ran the town.

The book goes back in time over Joe Chapin’s life. We meet his parents locked in a bitterly miserable marriage. Joe’s neurotic, sexually repressed, vindictive mother Charlotte transfers all of her ambition and attention to her son while sidelining her husband into becoming a marginal, distant figure in his own house. Joe eventually marries Edith Stokes, a woman made in the same mould as his mother, and so he steps from his mother’s leash to his wife’s. Nothing is spontaneous with these people, and everything is decided by a name, an address, or a bank account. Here’s Edith planning the wedding invitations which are designed to let people know whether or not they are important enough to be invited to the reception:

Her lists had been checked and rechecked long before the engagement announcements, so that when she took the list to Charlotte Chapin, the mother of the groom and the bride-to-be were almost in perfect accord. Names marked with an “R” for reception remained marked with an “R”; a few, but a very few, marked with a “C” for church-only, were remarked with an “R” because Charlotte felt that this husband or that husband was slightly more important in the business affairs of the town than Edith could be expected to know. “It will mean a lot to Joe later on, Edith dear. I’d have done just what you did, but if you let down the bars just a little bit, just in one or two instances, I know it will be appreciated. And they’re worthwhile people, and in one more generation there wouldn’t be the slightest question about their being invited. So don’t you think we ought to be nice to them now?”

And so Joe’s life is controlled from the cradle to the grave–first by his mother, and then by his wife. He rarely makes a decision about his own life; his college is selected for him; his friends are arranged–even his college roommate is no accident, and Joe’s carefully conditioned to not question the status quo or who should be considered as acceptable society. There are many great scenes in the book that illustrate this but my favourite occurs when Joe’s mother, Charlotte takes offence with how 10-year-old  Joe is treated by another mother, Blanche Montgomery, at a child’s birthday party. She vindictively colludes with an acquaintance  to punish Blanche by shutting her out of the ‘best’ society.

The exclusion of the Montgomerys from the informal little dinner club was not noticed until the unannounced twenty-couple limit had been reached and nominations closed. It was an informal club in that there was no clubhouse, it had no rooms, no place for a bulletin board, no stationery. Its name was The Second Thursdays, without the word club. When it was seen that the Montgomerys were not included (and it became known they had not been asked), their social indispensability was at an end. Charlotte’s strategy had included extra, direct snubs for Blanche Montgomery, but she need not have planned so carefully. The absence of the Montgomerys from The Second Thursdays lowered their standing in the eyes of nonmembers and members–and no one, or almost no one, ever knew what had happened. One day they were a first family; then in a short while they were just another old family with money. And even Blanche Montgomery did not suspect Charlotte, who was not a member of The Second Thursdays; nor did she suspect Bess, a woman incapable of intrigue. In her tears and anger she blamed herself, but she never discovered the real reason for the snub. Perhaps she spent too much money on clothes? Perhaps she had flirted with someone’s husband? Possibly they did not like the color she had chosen for the repainting of the old Montgomery mansion? She was fully aware of the enormity of her failure: not even being married to a Montgomery was enough to carry her, but being married to her was enough to hurt a Mongtomery. In 1930, when her son was a lawyer for the big bootleggers and organized prostitution, dressed like a bootlegger and one of the prostitutes’ best patrons–she still blamed herself, and wished that her boy could have turned out like Joe Chapin.

The novel is packed with unforgettable characters: the vicious, yet hale and hearty politician, Mike Slattery, a very powerful man who runs the local political scene, and his wife, Peg who wanted the wives of the local elite  to “not forget for a minute that she was the most powerful human influence upon one of the most powerful men in the Commonwealth.” If you want a favour–someone run out-of-town or an abortion arranged, then Mike is your man. Mike never forgets that people owe him, and he sees himself as the puppetmaster behind the scenes. Unfortunately, the Chapins never really understood that Slattery’s power did not run on the same level as their own. Since a great deal of the novel’s focus is on conformity and hypocrisy, it’s not too surprising that there’s a thread of sex–illicit, secret, repressed–running throughout the book and seen in the thoughts and actions of several characters.

Ten North Frederick, which was incidentally made into a film, is the portrait of a privileged American but it’s also the portrait of the first few decades of the American century with landmark historic events which don’t touch the Chapin family. WWI takes place off in the distance, prohibition reigns–not that the alcohol ban makes any difference whatsoever to Joe and his friends who always have plenty of alcohol to drink, the 1928 crash, (Joe loses money but life doesn’t change),  the depression and there are distant rumblings of WWII. Ten North Frederick is a monumental achievement. It begins with Joe’s funeral and the many versions of this man, so at first Joe appears in our vision as a complicated piece of origami which over the course of the book is unfolded, through his various relationships, to reveal … a blank, creased piece of paper, a remarkably empty human being. And yet at the same time, it’s to O’Hara’s credit that the character of Joe remains fundamentally sympathetic.

** For foreign readers, there are a few passages of Pennsylvania Dutch which I had to work my work through phonetically.

Osborne’s Revenge by Henry James

Emma recently read and blogged about one of my favourite Henry James novels, Washington Square, and I was motivated to return to one of my favourite authors. It was a matter of luck that I selected the short story, Osborne’s Revenge (1868), which clocks in at a mere 28 pages on my kindle, for the story is not only a perfect companion piece to Washington Square, but it’s also quintessential James.

The title indicates where the story will take us, but since this is Henry James, nothing is simple, and a great deal is submerged beneath that oh-so-polite behaviour. The story opens with the statement that “Philip Osborne and Robert Graham were intimate friends,” but to outsiders, the relationship is a “puzzle.”

Disinterested parties were at a loss to discover how Osborne had come to set his heart upon an insignificant, lounging invalid, who, in general company, talked in monosyllables, in a weak voice, and gave himself the airs of one whose nature had endowed with the right to be fastidious, without ever having done a stroke of work. Graham’s partisans, on the other hand, who were chiefly women (which, by the way, effectively relieves him from the accusation occasionally brought against him of being “effeminate”) were quite unable to penetrate the motives of his interest in a commonplace, hard-working lawyer, who addressed a charming woman as if he were exhorting a jury of grocers and undertakers, and viewed the universe as one vast “case.”

Following the advice of his physician, Graham is spending the summer at some medicinal springs in New York. Osborne hasn’t heard from his friend in some time when he finally receives a letter in which Graham confesses that he remains at the springs as he is “charmed” by a young woman he met there. From a mutual acquaintance, Osborne learns that Graham has fallen in love with a certain Miss Congreve, and that an announcement of an engagement was expected when a Mr Holland appeared at the resort and that Miss Congreve precipitously “transferred her favours” to the newcomer. According to the mutual acquaintance, the gossipy witness, Mrs Dodd, Graham is dying from a “broken heart.” Indeed, Graham seems to be shaken by the affair and shortly afterwards, he commits suicide.

Osborne doesn’t recover from his friend’s death and with some notion of revenge, he travels to Newport in order to seek out Miss Congreve….

This is a wonderful early Henry James short story, and as we so often see with this author, the main character (Osborne in this case) is actually outside of the main story–the failed love affair between Graham and Miss Congreve. All of the passion–the courtship, jealousy, despair and suicide have occurred off the pages, and instead we have Osborne left with the aftermath. Once again we see the passivity of Jamesian inaction, the complexities of human behaviour, motivation and psychology, and the turmoil of unexpressed emotion just underneath the surface of polite society.

How would Charlotte or Emily Bronte dealt with such a plot as Osborne’s Revenge? A rhetorical question, of course, but their pages would have included more passion, more action, and yet perhaps James’s subtle story is so exquisite because it’s fairly easy to step into the shoes of Osborne and hover around Miss Congreve as he tries to hate her, struggles with indecision and tries to make her pay for the death of his friend.

The Old Maid by Edith Wharton

Several times in 2010 I told myself I’d get back to Edith Wharton. I didn’t. But after writing my Best of 2010 list, I decided it was about time I got back to the books and authors I’d intended to revisit. That’s the good thing about compiling a list; it made me face all the reading I didn’t do.

So back to Edith Wharton–one of my favourite American authors. I’ve read her biggies: Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, House of Mirth, and a couple of others–including The Reef. It was time for something else, and I selected The Old Maid. Part of this selection rested on the 1939 Bette Davis film. I decided to read the book and then follow-up immediately with Bette. A good plan as it turns out.

The Old Maid is part of a series of four novellas intended by Wharton to depict Old New York in various decades: False Dawn (the 1840s), The Old Maid (the 1850s), The Spark (the 1860s), and New Year’s Day (the 1870s). Collectively these four novellas depict the codes and customs of New York society; these four novellas were published as  Old New York in 1924, but The Old Maid was written in 1921 and serialized in 1922. If you’ve read Edith Wharton before, you are familiar with the manner in which she places the individual in society–with characters sometimes trying to break the rules of society such as Countess Olenska in The Age of Innocence, or The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart–a spectator to the society she loathes and yet strives to be a part of. Thus in Wharton’s tales, what is often at stake is individualism vs. society. Perhaps that explains why The Custom of the Country’s opportunistic Undine Spragg is my all-time favourite Wharton female character.

The Old Maid is not an exception to Wharton’s premise–that society seems to be an organic being that will always further its own agenda with its members ready to winnow out the rebels for the collective good of society. The rebel in The Old Maid isn’t someone who fights against society’s rules, but rather someone who falls foul of socially acceptable behaviour and pays for it for the rest of her life.

The story opens with an introduction to the best families of New York society–in particular, the boringly respectable Ralstons:

In the old New York of the ‘thirties a few families ruled, in simplicity and affluence. of these were the Ralstons. The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had always been a fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders, and shipchandlers. Those well-fed, slow-moving people, who seemed irritable any dyspeptic to European eyes only because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted keyboards, on which Fate played without a sound.

A beautiful paragraph to start off a marvellous story. Then we are introduced to Delia Ralston née Lovell, “one of the handsomest and most popular young matrons.” Her self-satisfaction at her marriage to Jim Ralston, her pride in her beautiful home and her 2 perfect children is only occasionally troubled by “secret questioning” of the choices she made. Delia was once terribly in love with Clem Spender– “tolerant, reckless, indifferent to consequences,” he’s an unreliable, unpredictable member of New York society, so it’s probably a good thing he left and now lives permanently in Europe as an artist.

Delia’s peace of mind is shattered when her cousin, Charlotte Lovell begs for help. Charlotte is about to make an excellent, unexpected match with Jim Ralston’s cousin Joe.  Joe is Charlotte’s long-term suitor, but the courtship appeared to end when Charlotte was sent away for her health a few years before. She seemed relegated to the colourless life of spinsterhood, and this role is underscored by Charlotte’s devotion to a gaggle of poor children she tends in an old stable. Charlotte is particularly devoted to one orphan in particular, Clementina.

With the upcoming wedding, Joe Ralston asks his bride-to-be, Charlotte to abandon the children for fear of contagion. In desperation, Charlotte goes to Delia, and confessing that Clementina is her illegitimate baby, begs for Delia’s help and intervention.

That’s the opening premise of the story, and then the rest of the novella is concerned with the fallout: the relationships between Delia, Charlotte and Clementina.

The film version is moved ahead to the 1860s, and the Civil War plays a role in sanitizing some of the darker elements of Wharton’s tale. Clem Spender is portrayed as an aggrieved, depressed and rejected lover who impulsively enlists in the Union Army and is subsequently killed, and this death makes him a dead hero and takes away some awkward questions. I prefer Wharton’s byline: painful rehabilitation of Clem by a persistent, annoying relative. The film is structured around three weddings–beginning with Delia’s wedding to Jim Ralston, Charlotte’s wedding to Joe Ralston, and finally Clementina’s wedding.

The film shows Delia and Charlotte in conflict with each other over possession of Clementina (a peevish brat in the film version), and misses Wharton’s delicate positioning of society within the narrative. Whereas Charlotte (played by Bette Davis) comes out as the heroine–maligned and misjudged by all, in the novel Wharton seems to say that Delia’s actions are equally brave. By standing by Charlotte, Delia (whatever her motives are) also pays a price. The rest of New York society considers her a little eccentric, and eventually, by her later actions, Delia alienates her two children.

Wharton’s novella The Old Maid isn’t the story of two women who struggle for the love of a daughter, but the story of two women who want to exist within their society while breaking the rules of good conduct, and as such their choices are limited. Delia is at first motivated by her sense of what’s right and proper; she’s outraged and shocked by Charlotte’s secret, and yet she doesn’t thrown Charlotte to the wolves; she concocts a way for Charlotte and Clementina to stay together within the society they strive to remain a part of:

Social tolerance was not dealt in the same measure to men and to women, and neither Delia nor Charlotte had ever wondered why: like all the young women of their class, they simply bowed to the ineluctable.

The film is well-worth catching–not just for the story and the excellent acting, but for an exercise in contrast.

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

Power, authority and ‘the rules.’

I picked Hard Rain Falling off my shelf as part of my determination to read more titles from  NYRB. I read a couple of their books last year, and Stephen Benatar’s Leave Her Safe At Home was so good, I decided to start specifically looking at this publisher in case I was missing other literary treasures. I’d read quite a few 19th century novels in a row, and now I was ready for something different. Something modern and hard-boiled. So I perused my shelf and Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter caught my eye. This novel is so good, that although it’s only April, I am sure this book will be one of my reads of the year, and I’m going to call it one of the great American novels of the 20th century.

Hard Rain Falling is the story of the life of Jack Levitt, the unwanted product of a brief, violent union. There’s a short prologue (1929-1936) which outlines Jack’s origins, and then the novel begins in 1947 with Jack as a tough 17-year-old runaway in Portland. He’s unemployed and has various ways of grifting a dollar or two from his circle of similarly placed friends–a loose knit group known as “the Broadway Gang.” Jack is known as “one of those who would stop at nothing.” But there’s a subtle difference between Jack and the other members of the gang:

 “Most of them were like Jack Levitt in that they wanted a lot of money and wanted to do anything they pleased, at least for a while; but most of them saw it differently: they wanted to enjoy themselves now, because they knew in their hearts that soon they would get jobs and get married and start having families (like their own), and the fun would be over. “

Jack doesn’t envision his future in the same way. This sets him apart from the other rowdy, but normal teens, and Jack as a “cynical optimist” understands that he is different.  The other gang members have family to fall back on and they can return to the nest if things get too tough. So far, Jack’s life has been spent in an orphanage–a bleak institution with meaningless or cruel rules and regulations. Now poised on the edge of adulthood, Jack imagines his future as “a wildness in itself, a succession of graduated pleasures and loves and joys.” When Jack’s story begins he’s hit rock-bottom and with a fair amount of optimism he outlines his desires and expectations:

“It was a gray Portland day, and this helped him to feel sorry for himself. He was down to his last few dollars and locked out of his hotel room. He had quit his job and did not know where he could get some more money. He was legally a fugitive from the orphanage, and in that sense “wanted.” He did not feel “wanted”–he felt very unwanted. He had desires, and nobody was going to drop out of the sky to satisfy them. He tried to milk a little self-pity out of this thought, but it did not work: he had to recognise that he preferred his singularity, his freedom. All right. He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car, in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour (he had only recently learned how to drive, and he loved the feelings of speed and control, the sharpness of the danger). He wanted some new clothes and thirty-dollar shoes. He wanted a .45 automatic. He wanted a record player in the big hotel room he wanted, so he could lie in bed with the whiskey and the piece of ass and listen to “How Hight the Moon” and “Artistry Jumps.” That was what he wanted . So it was up to him to get these things.”

How Jack sets out to get these things is of course exactly where things go wrong. Sent to reform school, Jack later briefly returns to society for a catastrophically short taste of freedom.

Hard Rain Falling is sometimes described as prison literature or crime fiction, and yet those descriptions fail to capture the sheer greatness of this novel. George Pelecanos in the introduction states: “I hesitate to classify the novel as either a literary or genre work” and I think he’s right on target.

Hard Rain Falling is written with a raw honesty that’s rare. Oddly enough the book reminds me of Oscar Moore’s A Matter of Life and Sex–but at the same time, these two books centre on entirely different worlds; Moore’s novel explores the world of gay sex while Carpenter’s novel concerns the life of a down-and-out young man whose life gravitates towards crime. The novels are similar only in the fact that they both feature a youthful protagonist whose inner life in revealed with painful intensity.  Moore’s novel details the life of Hugo, a 14-year-old emotionally troubled boy who drifts into self-destruction as a way of avoiding emotion. While Jack may seem to be self-destructive, he isn’t. At crucial points throughout the novel , Jack tries to puzzle out what life means, and while he recognises the need to stop and think, he’s swept up by his poor choices. But the absolutely fascinating thing about Jack is that he pays for his mistakes, and he doesn’t begrudge the payment. 

Jack isn’t a particularly likeable character. At one point, he longs to kill someone, yet at times he acts with an innate sense of fairness. He’s tough and violent but he’s also a survivor and while he walks into some very foolish situations, he also possesses an uncanny understanding of the institutional system. He can identify some people as con-lovers–those who get a cheap thrill from contact from the convicts. He becomes the product of the institutions that have kept him caged and this provides him with a unique perspective on the pathology of power. Here’s Jack in the orphanage talking about the troubling nature of power and authority:

“The trouble was it was intangible. It was not in the hands of anyone. While Jack had been there, most of the boys had blamed the man who was in charge of the orphanage as the center of power; they believed that all that happened to them and all that did not happen to them originated with this one  tall, heavy, white-haired man. But then one day, during the middle of Jack’s wing’s play period, they saw the man walking across the yard, his hands behind his back, his head tilted forward–the way he always walked when he was angry and determined–saw him suddenly stop and look straight up in the sky and give a grunt and fall backward, saw him fall with a thump onto the frozen ground and saw him carted away, and learned the next day that what they had seen was the death of this man, taken by a heart attack and dead before they got him indoors and got his clothes off. And that night all the boys in Jack’s wing nourished a secret joy at the man’s death and many of them thought in their hearts that they would be set free now that the center of power was gone, or at the very least that their lives would change in some magnificent way and they would be free at last of the man’s mechanical tyranny; some of them even though that candy would be passed out to them. But they learned. Very quickly there was another administrative head to the orphanage and he was different in appearance only. So it was an intangible; not a man , a set of rules. It would not even do any good to steal the rules away from the office and burn them, because there wasn’t even a book in which the rules were kept. It was just that the authorities knew the rules. You could kill them all and the rules would remain. This was the great virtue of rules, they were told in somewhat different context.”

Later, as it turns out, Jack’s recognition of the power structures within society proves invaluable when he’s sentenced to prison. By this time, he’s an old hand at understanding how power and authority work. Power amongst the prison guards and also power amongst the other prisoners. Jack makes little distinction.

In spite of its subject matter, and make no mistake this is a hard-boiled dark tale, Hard Rain Falling is ultimately not a depressing novel. Part of the novel’s power is found in Jack’s maturation which occurs outside of regret, bitterness or even social redemption. The novel never stoops to clichés but instead Jack’s pursuit of freedom and his odyssey through various state institutions reveal his unique, sometimes poignant interpretations of life. Never an intricate or valued part of society, Jack possesses an introspection on freedom that many of us cannot attain. Perhaps an explanation about Jack’s optimism can be found in this quote from the introduction:

“I’m an atheist,” said Carpenter in a 1975 interview.  “I don’t see any moral superstructure to the universe at all. I consider my work optimistic in that the people, during the period I’m writing about them, are experiencing intense emotion. It is my belief that this is all there is to it. There is nothing beyond this.”

Hard Rain Falling was first published in 1966

McTeague by Frank Norris

This 2009 reading of Frank Norris’s McTeague was the third reading for me, and I returned to this American classic novel of Old San Francisco after watching Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent film version with its appropriate title: Greed. McTeague is one of my favourite American classics, and it’s a favourite for its dark undertones of lust, violence, murder, sadomasochism, and obsession. No wonder literary critics were outraged when McTeague was published in 1899. On the West Coast, a reviewer for The Argonaut argued that “Norris riots in odors and stenches,” while The New York based monthly journal, The Review of Reviews called McTeague “about the most unpleasant American story that anybody has ventured to write.” Of the liberal amount of invective launched at the novel by literary critics, the latter quote remains my favourite as it is quite true, but that’s the point. Norris’s novel is unrelentingly bleak and grimy, but it’s also wonderful.

The novel’s plot concerns a San Francisco dentist named McTeague. McTeague, the blockish son of an alcoholic miner worked as a car-boy at the Big Dipper mine in Placer County when he left to become the apprentice of a traveling dentist. The dentist is a “charlatan” but McTeague doesn’t understand this, and after watching the dentist pull out teeth for a few years, McTeague sets up his “Dental Parlours” (a rented room where he works and sleeps) in San Francisco’s Polk Street. This is where the novel begins with McTeague spending a typical Sunday in San Francisco: he eats a heavy meal, returns to the Dental Parlours , drinks beer and plays the handful of tunes he knows on his concertina. At “six feet and three inches,” McTeague is a “young giant”:

“McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish. Yet there was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient.”

McTeague doesn’t stop to think about his life, but he’s considered a success, and since he’s hauled himself up from manual labour at the mine to the professional classes, this is justified. McTeague’s simple life changes when he’s introduced to Trina, a beautifully made, tiny young woman who is brought to McTeague for dental care by her cousin and sweetheart, Marcus, McTeague’s best friend. The problems begin when McTeague, in a fit of lust, kisses Trina while she’s asleep under the effects of ether. McTeague then wants to court and marry Trina, and Marcus, who wasn’t that committed to the relationship anyway, agrees to step aside. McTeague’s slow, methodical and predatory courtship is darted with instances of lust, and at these moments, Trina panics and quails with fear at McTeague’s brutal onslaught.

The plot thickens when Trina buys a lottery ticket that turns out to be the winning number, and so when Mac (as she calls him) and Trina marry, she brings with her a ‘dowry’ of $5,000, and this money becomes the root of their problems. At first, their marriage is satisfactory, but gradually Trina becomes obsessed with money, and then their luck turns sour….

It’s impossible to read McTeague without thinking about and comparing it to Zola’s novel L’Assommoir, published in 1877. L’Assommoir, one of Zola’s greatest novels, and part of the Rougon-Macquart twenty-volume series is the tale of a Parisian laundress named Gervaise. Gervaise’s story is a study of poverty and working-class life tainted with alcoholism. Zola’s naturalistic novels examine the themes of hereditary and environment, and Norris who was heavily influenced by Zola, considered L’Assommoir to be the “prototype of McTeague.” Certainly literary critics made the connection, and as the introduction by Kevin Starr explains, one critic “castigated Norris for reintroducing the corrupting moral vogue of Zolaism” onto American shores.

Both L’Assommoir and McTeague feature main characters who rise from the minionship of the working class to the next level. Gervaise becomes an employer when she opens her laundry shop, and McTeague leaves the physical labour of the mines behind when he becomes a dentist. McTeague never really grasps the idea that he is supposed to go to university and get a diploma–to McTeague, his dental career is eventually stolen from him by forces he cannot understand. Both Gervaise and McTeague’s destruction are engineered and accelerated by alcoholism and jealousy. But it’s where McTeague is different from L’Assommoir that things really become interesting.

While L’Assommoir is concerned with a lack of money, McTeague is about the misuse of money. If Gervaise has money, she spends it, and eventually of course, she spends money she doesn’t have and bankrupts herself in the process. In contrast, in McTeague Trina hordes money and becomes a miser–at one point she even ignores her mother’s request for help. Although she and McTeague are wealthy by late 19th century standards, Trina would rather eat rotting meat than disturb her nest egg. Having money corrupts Trina and McTeague. It’s not their salvation, it’s their nemesis. It’s the acquisition of money, the hording of money that becomes their destruction–compounded by hereditary and environmental factors.

“Trina had always been an economical little body, but it was only since her great winnings in the lottery that she had become especially penurious. No doubt, in her fear lest their good luck should demoralize them and lead to habits of extravagance, she had recoiled too far in the other direction. Never, never, never should a penny of that miraculous fortune be spent; rather it should be added to. It was a nest egg, a monstrous, roc-like nest egg, not so large, however, but that it could be made larger.”

The idea of the corrupting force of money appears throughout McTeague–from the endeavours to extract gold from the Big Dipper mine to the brutality of Zerkow, a neighbourhood junk shop owner who marries his wife, Maria simply because she entertains him with fantastic tales of long-lost gold plate. These stories drive Zerkow to insanity–just as Trina’s horde leads to a sort of madness too. Gold appears throughout the novel–at the mine, in McTeague’s crude dentistry, and at one point in the tale, Trina buys a model of a huge gold tooth to hang outside of Mac’s Dental Parlours. To own and display this gold tooth is a long-held dream of McTeague’s, and it’s one of the last things he refuses to part with–at one point the couple even use it as a table in the squalor of their rented room. Symbolically, even McTeague’s canary spends its sad, trapped little life in a gilt cage.

Norris based McTeague on a real-life crime that took place in San Francisco in 1893. He was a student at Berkeley at the time, and he began to be fascinated by bourgeois and working class life. After failing to get a degree, there followed a period at Harvard, various overseas adventures in South Africa, and then Norris returned to San Francisco and the Big Dipper Mine to recuperate his health. San Francisco is one of those cities that has a great deal of character–just watch Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear or Humphrey Bogart in Dark Passage to get a sense of how characters’ lives are shaped by the city they live in. Norris’s pre-1906 earthquake San Francisco is raw and new but still pulsing with life, and the novel’s characters mesh with their landscape. There’s the colourful street life of Polk Street, Cliff House, Union Street, the Presidio Reservation, the Golden gate, the ferry, the variety show at the Orpheum, and the magnificent views of the Pacific Ocean.

McTeague is not a perfect novel, and parts of the story seem rougher than others. Sections which move away from McTeague and Trina as individual characters and instead convert them into types are poorer than the main narrative. For example at one point, Norris describes Trina’s growing sexual awareness as “The Woman is awakened.” Other sections include Trina’s German relatives speaking broken English–and this sort of dialogue is always a problem for writers. Norris turns it into a phonetic event. Also while Zola’s influence is clear in McTeague, there are two characters–veterinarian Old Grannis and spinster Miss Baker–who could very well have lost their way from a Dickens novel. This dark tale is frequently interrupted with sentimental details of the relationship between the elderly couple. Perhaps Norris intended this romance to provide a counterbalance against the dark destruction of the McTeagues.

McTeague hints at a tremendous talent that is not yet fully developed. Norris was a mere 29 years old when he finished this novel. Tragically, Norris died at the age of 32 from a ruptured appendix and kidney failure in 1902. Coincidentally, Zola died the same year.