What constitued meals, what times the streets came alive, what was considered respectable in the period all interested me a good deal. Moreover, Norris was a child of privilege and his attitudes reflect his status and his times.īut details in the book are of great historical interest: I had thought that 'outta sight' as 'wonderful' and the nasty custom of displaying wedding presents were only a few decades old. ![]() Where Zola describes how gold chains are made and integrates this into the story, Norris writes about dentistry in a way that simply makes the reader aware that Norris had researched the topic. A couple of scenes at least and major themes are very close to those in L'Assomoir, but where Zola makes the reader smell and taste a wedding breakfast, Norris just writes a lot of words about one. Moreover he seems to filch from rather than take as an influence the Continental Naturalists. Norris is much too fond of the epithet, the melodramatic, the repetitious, the cod dialect. Halfway through McTeague it occurred to me that were I to write about the book here, it woeuld be to recommend it as fit only for students of American Realism and Eric von Stroheim completists. ![]() Show More Trina-and, much more important, her windfall-from him and a few years later takes revenge. It's not a book I ever want to read again-and I'm relieved to be done with it! It will stay on my shelf for period references only. So on one hand, the book was very useful for my purposes, and on the other it's filled with foul characters and period racism that makes me wince. This was regarded as so outrageous that it was removed in later editions, though the Penguin Classics version stays with the original text. Starr's introduction notes, though, that the biggest controversy when the book came out wasn't the horrid abuses committed by McTeague, but a small scene towards the beginning where a little boy wets his pants in public. The book is very much a product of its time period, and even includes a reference to a stove shining like a Negro's skin. Many of the other residents described on Polk Street are also obsessed with money, including the stereotypical Jew obsessed with finding gold. By the end, she's lost many of her fingers, is abandoned by her lout of a husband, and lives in abject poverty, but finally pulls all of her gold coins from the bank and strips down naked to sleep with her money pressed to her skin. Trina is really a likeable character until she becomes more twisted as the book goes on and her frugality turns to avarice. His fiancee, Trina, wins $5,000 in a lottery jackpot, and is a complete miser about the winnings. He yearns for a massive gold tooth for his sign. McTeague in his younger days mined in the Sierras, and in middle age is a non-licensed dentist in San Francisco. The scenes of domestic abuse are disturbing even by today's standards, as McTeague bites his wife's fingers to the point of infection and amputation, even as he steals her horde of money and abandons her. In the course of the book, he becomes a depressed, abusive drunk. From the start, McTeague is described as rather dense, a big man with few brains. By "realism," it means the characters are mostly unlikeable, and are designed to be so. ![]() The main characters are the dentist, McTeague, and his wife, Trina. At heart, it's a story revolving around the American dream and its corruption by greed. This book was highly controversial when it was released. ![]() The back cover description notes this is a work of "American realism," and the introduction by Kevin Starr goes into greater detail on that subject. It's smooth and very straightforward, much more so than Norris's The Octopus which I read last year. Show More they drank (steam beer!), the structure of a full-day picnic outing, the racial demographics on a common street, etc.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |