McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

Frank Norris (1870-1902) is comparable with other turn of the century American writers such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Harold Frederic. Like Crane he died at a young age (32), but not before producing an impressive body of work that anyone twice his age would have been proud of. He is best known for three novels: `McTeague` (1899), `Octopus` (1901) and `Vandover and the Brute` (posthumously published 1914), the last critically his best. All three are now in a single volume by the Library of America ensuring Norris a place in the American literary canon. Norris was mainly influenced by Charles Dickens and Emile Zola. McTeague, written while Norris was in college taking sophomore level grammar classes on how to write, was a conscious attempt at bringing the "European style" of Zola, in particular Zola's masterpiece L'Assommoir (1877), to American literature. With its focus on the poor working class who "degenerate" into alcohol, sex, violence and greed - it was thought poor people were naturally (genetically) disposed to these vices - Norris copies and imitates Zola's Naturalism, but set in the city of San Francisco. Critics generally hated it and saw it as cheap genre titillation of the sense hardly worthy of review, but a few saw it as groundbreaking. Norris is incredibly easy to read, he was originally a journalist and wrote simply to get the facts across, considering himself an "anti-stylist" without using complex sentences or fancy words. His intention was to get to the truth of the thing and such a simple writing style is very effective aesthetically for the novels subject. At the same time it lacks the depth and scope of Zola; the characters often feel contrived and one-sided, the secondary characters are right out of Dickens complete with sentimentality which jars with the Realism. The novel starts out slow but picks up pace in the last third, maintaining a gripping narrative up to the surprise last sentence that left me hooting for joy. Norris had seen early cinema and many of the scenes are described in a way that is reminiscent of early film. McTeague had such an impact on director Erich von Stroheim that he made it into an epic 10-hour long film Greed (1924), the most exspensive film ever made at the time, today it is one of the most famous films in history.

One of the reasons that people read novels is to explore why human beings do what they do. These reasons flow in surges that go in and out of vogue. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the current vogue was Naturalism, a philosophy of life that suggests that people are preprogrammed by their environment to such an extent that one can accurately predict the outcome. In MCTEAGUE, Frank Norris absorbed the biological imperatives of Charles Darwin into the economic choke-hold of Karl Marx and wrote a novel of a hulking unlicensed dentist who goes through life smashing all obstacles with his hamlike fists early enough and often enough so that the reader feels sure that this dentist (McTeague) will wind up at the mercy of the very elements that he tried so hard to conquer. The novel opens with the revelation that McTeague is a brute who chose dentistry as a profession despite the fact that he barely understood the medical books of his field. He meets and marries Trina, a good woman who mistakes McTeague's size and stupidity for passion and permanence. McTeague's married life is a straight line progression from worse to worst, all of which was eminently predictable from the opening pages. One gets the feeling that McTeague remains a mystery, despite his punishing appearance on nearly every page. Why, one further wonders, does he do things the way he does. Norris provides no ready answers, but he suggests that McTeague is a ubiquitous force of nature, one that is more easily noticed than explained. Sigmund Freud had not yet appeared to offer deeper analyses of the human psyche so naturalistic writers like Frank Norris were left with rationales that equated with the natural world around them. Darwin and his struggle of the fittest made it easier for readers to see McTeague as somehow fitter to survive than the victims of his rage. Marx and his economic determinism made it equally easier for readers to grasp the fact that one's freedom to move was limited by where on the economic pecking order one stood. By the end of the novel, a handcuffed McTeague, alone in the unforgiving desert, was a stark reminder that the power of nature to twist man into a pretzel was one that resonated with Norris' readers such that they could see McTeague's final plight more as a peek into their own future than into his. Today's readers leave MCTEAGUE with much the same morbid thoughts.

I, like at least one other reviewer below, first heard of Frank Norris while rummanging the bookstore. After finishing McTeague, it puzzles me how I made it to age 25, through high school and college American Lit courses without reading him! Maybe I'm bold but I enjoyed this book more than any Hawthorne, Steinbeck or Twain.This book is realism thrice over. The first 'realism' is coventional. Norris in the vain of the French realists writes a novel exploring people with complete human imperfections. From the feeble-witted McTeague (Norris never gives us his first name) to his avaricious wife Trina, we are introduced to a cast of characters who fuction the way people do. And unlike today's 'realist' literature that tries to be shocking for shock value, Norris is nothing but sincere.The second 'realism' is Norris's refreshing 'fly on the wall' approach. Unlike fellow realists like Dreiser and Lewis, Norris does not judge his characters- never commenting or moralizing, just reporting. Through two murders, one rape fantasy and spousal abuse among other things, Norris simply tells it as it 'happens.' The third 'realism' is in the language, both that of the characters and the novelist. It is always said that Hemingway was the one who taught us that descriptively, less is more. Now I see that there would have been no Hemingway without Norris. He is sparse and terse, giving the novel a life-like tone. The characters tend to stammer ("Yeah- uh- uh- yeah, that's the word") reflecting the way we really talk.This is not Henry James, Edith Wharton or Harriet Stowe. It is a gritty tale set in 1890's San Francisco with an ending that will leave you in nothing less than shock. Before Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, there was Frank Norris and McTeague.

Hello there. First of all I should say that I saw the movie first and then I read the book. The movie it was based exactly like the book, with the same scenes, the director (strohein) he even made the movie just like the book. But the producer cutted it, because it was 8 hours of length. The book talks about Mc Teague a dentist who falls in love of one of his patients, the cousin of his best friend, and his best friend helped him to get married. And after this she wins the lottery and there it start an history of love, poor, greed, traitors and death. Good book to read, and great move to watch.

McTeague, the man, is the embodiment of the majority of human civilization. The simplicity and directness of the themes are so free-flowing they are hardly noticible: success, wealth, power, the fear of losing that which elevates citizens to one of the three social classes: 1) Wealth 2) Middle-class 3) Poverty. The characters in the novel: McTeague, Trina, Marcus, Zerkow, etc., are all simple-minded individuals longing for something that is universal in life: success and comfort. But what happens when that goal, that climax, is never achieved, almost achieved but never fully there or worse yet, achieved but then brutally snatched away? That is what happenes to McTeague, a dentist, who can no longer practice his craft because he holds no dental degree. What happens when that comfort zone, that stability, is yanked away and gnawed into pieces so miniscule it can't be reconstructed to its original form? Can he rise from his adversity or will he, like many before him and many after him, fall into the pits of criminal behavior and social depravity? As is always unfortunately the case, the latter is almost always what comes into fruition. There is a force in the novel that brings the characters quietly together. The dark happenings that they incur as a result of their narrow-minded longings almost makes what happens to them inevitable. The writing itself is lucid and relaxed, which is a real accomplishment considering the horror he puts his characters through. The scenes of San Francisco, the desert and the village-oriented type feel of Polk Street where the beginning action takes place are wonderfully described, not laborious as compared to the old and tragic English novels of the 19th Century and onward. For any literate individual interested in how greed can destroy a life, McTeague is the book for you.