Frank Norris (1) (1870–1902)

The tale is a bracing immersion in the language and material culture of turn of the 20th C. San Francisco. I would normally have trouble understanding how much of a windfall Trina Sieppe's 5,000$ would be in current dollars, but Norris' close attention to the acquisition and selling off of possessions kept me well up on the value of a dollar at the time.
The whole thing is sort of Zola in America, and maybe a touch of Hermann Broch in mood. Heck--it's a weird little book, and Jack London show more always seems just out of frame, only to come into full view at the end. Setting is as much foreground as the characters and story that begins in a world of melodeons, steel portraits and lace curtains, only to end in Landscape; the kind that is itself and crushes people, which I guess is a relief after watching people crush people.
In America, there was a lot of landscape between a melodeon on the west coast and a melodeon on the east coast. I alway enjoy that distance in American literature and love best those books which brood as this distance moves west and gets filled up. show less

Oh, this is a filthy book. For the first three quarters or so I thought I was going to write a short review that praised Norris's occasional happy confluence of lyrical description and Zolaesque social realism while looking at the rhetorical reasons his attempt to evoke a sort of oceanic time and teleology underpinning human and inhuman affairs is incoherent and his characters come off kind of like cod-sitcom neghbours at moments (in brief, because you can reach for the epic by describing show more the wheat or the way a character's hair curls in front of his ears with the same formula again and again and reach after Homeric, "wine-dark sea" ground, but you can't do it with character catchphrases, or maybe you could in 1901 but not in 2009, because TV ruined catchphrases, sorry). And then give it, like, a 3.


But as best-laid plans unravel for the league of ranchers in their struggle against the railroad's transport monopoly and ownership of their land, Norris's story unravels too, with shocking speed. For moments earlier in the book he even seemed like a socialist, but as soon as the railroad (SPOILERZ) wins unequivocally, the narrative starts licking their boots as a matter of course. Annixter, Osterman, Broderson and the rest aren't even cold in their graves before we get all this about how the men who make the decisions for the railroad and crush the small homesteaders aren't responsible, and it's pointless to blame them because the railroad/octopus is part of a FORCE, a FORCE, a fucking ill-defined late-19th century positivist-mystical FORCE that delivers wheat to starving millions in India and is in a spurious and ill-defined way part of a cycle of life that makes the slaugher of the ranchers and appropriation of their land okay, a kind of figurative mulch.


But maybe that shouldn't surprise, because Norris seems to hold human life cheap in that late-19th-century way that led to the Somme and always makes you wish you could go back and assemble the mighty of the nations, maybe on the deck of the Graf Zeppelin, just to give them a reeeallly sarcastic thumbs up. Harran Derrick dies in a shootout with the Old West version of jackbooted thugs and still gets no narrative arc of his own; his whole role here is as motive factor for his father's final breakdown--you know, the real tragedy here. I don't know WHAT the fascination is among a certain strain of American writer with fucking straight-backed patriarchs and their fucking hawklike noses and fucking moral authority and fucking RECTITUDE (John Steinbeck is another prime offender), but I can only assume it stems from a deepseated psychological need to be punished by an Old Testament father and love him for it. And I was hopeful when Norris started to talk about Magnus Derrick in terms of a thwarted will to power and a need to dominate that he would have a more probing touch, but no--it's the pile of death that's the appetizer in this tragedy and the humiliation of one pointless old fascist that's the main course.

But Magnus's fall isn't the only thing that's considered more tragic than the massacre in the wheat fields. For most of the book, I thought Hooven was just a tired German stereotype with an execrably rendered accent. But no, it turns out when he dies that we're to be treated to a little morality play where his daughter, whom we've already been served warning is a little bit rotten inside because she likes the boys or whatever, gets separated from her mother and sister and in a mere day or two turns to prostitution, which you may think is a little fast, but she just isn't able to come up with any other course of action except wandering from place to place pathetically and starving. And it's a family trait--her mother literally wanders around San Francisco like nothing so much as a kid from the suburbs who doesn't want to call her parents for a ride and has to start panhandling for bus change. Only Mrs. Hooven has no parents and is not very good at begging, so she literally dies in the street after all of three days or something without food, without ever trying to steal a loaf or throw herself on the mercy of the Church or knock on every door in the rich district and look pathetic with her baby and all. This is not realism, Frank Norris; if human beings had no more resourcefulness and survival instinct than that, we wouldn't have survived long enough to settle California in the fucking first place.


But the final straw is that when Mrs. Hooven expires with a rattle and the younger daughter Hilda is conveniently adopted by a rich family (bad timing, that--oh well, call the meatwagon to pick up the old broad), our narrator editorializes, not about how hard her life will be because she's an orphan, not even about the burden (if we MUST talk in these terms) of having a father who was a "terrorist"--no, Hilda's life is going to be ruined because her sister is a "_____". And you know what "_____" means. MINNA HOOVEN, WHORE, TOO BAD U GOT HUNGRY AND SOLD YOUR ASS, WHORE. LADIES, STAY PURE OR PLEASE GO DIE.


And it just goes on like this. After Presley's big encounter with Shelgrim, the railroad CEO (which only serves to establish that in Norris's world the monopolists are all JEWS and we all know that Jews are SNAKES--this in contrast to the real world, where it was exactly the bunch of East Coast Protestant financiers you'd expect) and Norris's exculpation of the railmen (because a SNAKE JEW can't help but be a JEW SNAKE), we get a totally unnecessary sycophantic little passage where Presley rejects the anarchism of the barkeep Caraher because it's anti-life and whatnot. Better anything than red--wasn't quite fair play on the part of the railroad, but no need to get radical, right? (I understand from the afterword that Norris may have put this in so as to not get in trouble with his publisher and the real P&SW Railway, which means he gets a sarcastic thumbs up all to himself).


And for those of us who still nurse a grudge against the capitalists, we get the ludicrous, grotesque interlude of S. Behrman's death--patronizing pandering in its Gothic ghost-story punishment-lust. Just to remind us that there's something wrong with US for hatin', not him. NOT S. BEHRMAN! (Although now that I think of it doesn't that name seem kind of Jewish too?) It's a similar thing to Mrs. Hooven above--the over-the-topness of the depiction makes it a mockery.


And when finally we've seen how leftists are traitors and women who have sex out of wedlock are bitch whores and the capitalists are a bit sneaky and Jewish but ultimately not to be blamed because exploitation is an important and awesome part of natural processes beyond human ken and all the blood and death in this book is small beans beside the gravy stain it leaves on the fucking moral ascot of the Lion in Winter--THEN Vanamee, the Jesus figure, has the gall to show up and tell us it's all totally cool because he's not sad any more that his ol' lady got all raped and dead, because it turns out she has a daughter who looks just like her and JUST GOT NUBILE and DEFINITELY WANTS TO BANG THIS SMELLY ITINERANT IN HER MOM'S PLACE and THE CIRCLE OF LIFE CONTINUES.


And I have obviously engaged in hyperbole here, and I'd like to give this an extra half star because ultimately, to be frank, I agree with Norris on that score--the circle of life does continue, and that's the most beautiful thing there is. But I just can't, because I feel suckered. The first three quarters of this book Norris pretends like he's on the side of our little band of heroes, and sketches their struggles compellingly. And then suddenly it's fuck 'em all as he tries to huckster us with a banal version of the interconnectedness of all things predicated on the idea that sleeping with a hot thirteen-year-old is just like sleeping with her hot dead mother only better. Fuck off, Frank Norris. You and your evil book. show less

While more than a great read, I cannot pretend to agree with the dire determinism of the author, Frank Norris. This novel of California wheat farmers versus the Railroad (the 'Octopus' of the title) is in the naturalistic tradition of Zola. In fact I was reminded of my reading of Germinal at times while rereading this classic, yet flawed, novel. Norris tends toward hyperbole at times and the prose can be somewhat melodramatic, yet it is a lucidly written novel with fascinating characters. show more The poet, Presley, is one character who particularly fascinated me. Presumably a stand-in for Norris himself, Presley is able to comment on the action and almost persuade the people to rise up against the Railroad; however, he is ultimately unsuccessful in changing their fate determined by Nature. Norris planned a trilogy based on his story of 'Wheat' but only finished one more volume, The Pit, before his untimely death. show less

There was such a waste of life presented here. At many moments I wanted to speak omnisciently to the community and direct that somebody intervene to help the characters, but it would have already been too late. There was a point early in the presentation of each character in which another path could have been chosen, but an early choice led inevitably to a journey down the path of personal doom. Some of these choices were made even before the novel began. What makes these early choices so show more important is that characters have no safety net. It is not just the impact of a single choice, but the impact of a single choice in the social context in which the most basic human need to be loved and understood is not met. Characters are not capable of full introspection and Norris does not directly address this but instead shows their internal lives from external description of their appearance and behavior.

A fundamental point of this book is that people make choices within the limits of their human understanding, and that there are times and places in which the world is very hostile. Individuals do not have the support they need to make better choices when things go wrong. Instead, the world sort of falls apart for the individual, they can't see a way out, and the larger world is too wrapped up in its own day to day affairs to see or care that someone is individually suffering.

This sort of brutal realism is difficult, but people continue to live in this construct now. It is easy to say that individuals have free will in their personal actions, but how free is the will of someone who is truly not capable of seeing a larger view of his or her actions? How can we blame the individual who not only is stuck in the reality of a systemically brutal world but also has had no one who can help to cause greater understanding? This highlights the need for connecting individuals in some meaningful way to other individuals who can actually assist, through familial, religious, or educational guidance. There has to be some realistic way to expand what is possible for individuals to make better choices and when we choose to ignore the need for this there are societal consequences.

This book constructs a world with similarities to those presented in Sister Carrie (Dreiser) and Burmese Days (Orwell). As is consistent with its genre, it presents the flaws and prejudices of its time and requires an eye for context. It has a lot to offer for an interested reader. show less