The Octopus: A Story of California Book

I read this novel years ago after an undergraduate English professor kept mentioning it in a survey class I took on American literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was not an assigned text, though it was one that he clearly favored. I liked the professor very much; he was an impressively learned old school man who lectured with confident ease on a broad canvas about philosophical, political, and social currents that formed the backdrop of whatever works we happened to be reading.

This was 1975, when English professors knew their literature and the social and intellectual and political contexts in which it was written. They didn't trouble us with bizarre literary theories and pretentious jargon (the toxic waste that started spreading in the '80s and is unlikely ever to be effectively contained and remediated). I was a freshman and had never before heard a teacher speak so effortlessly on so many high-toned intellectual topics. And so I felt compelled to read this important American novel which, unsurprisingly, nobody really reads anymore, and that is a shame. The characters are memorable and the story is compelling.

File under "naturalism." This is a term I have never especially liked, because it seems misleading. It is a word that does not effectively convey exactly what the main ingredients of this literary movement are. How does the word "naturalism" come to mean a school of literature in which characters are subjected to Darwinian forces beyond their control? What is "natural" about that? Like it or not, naturalism means exploitation, avarice, and how people, caught up in their inexorable grip, are crushed by the the raw exercise of economic and political power. Like the railroad in this novel, whose tentacles strangle those who attempt in vain to oppose its unstoppable grasp.

Seems to me a novel like this would be perfectly appropriate to the conditions which prevail in the USA a century later: extreme wage inequality, rampant dishonesty and corruption on the part of politicians, market manipulation and rapacious greed that are normative behavior on Wall Street, and powerful corporations who fire employees, move jobs to other countries, and strip remaining employees of basic benefits, all the while paying top management salaries that balloon ever higher into the stratosphere. A new Octopus for a new age.