McTeague: A Norton Critical Edition Book

This is one of those chunky "classics" that not a lot of people have heard of. Frank Norris only wrote a few novels, with the most famous being, The Octopus: A Story of California, one of those books that rails against social injustice, with its target - evil, railroad barons. MUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (I can do this all day) MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Norris was one of those turn-of-the-century writers, like Jack London, who liked to get down and dirty and live among the people he was writing about - miners, stevedores, shopkeepers, hookers - so, it's not a surprise that he lived fast and hard and died young - leaving a pox ridden corpse.

One of the reasons this book endures is probably because Eric von Stroheim made an excessively long (around eight hours) silent movie called Greed, based on the book. The making of the film seems to be a terrific story unto itself, but suffice it say that von Stroheim was a tad bit over-the-top in his love of the book (gifs from the film pepper this review).



Greed is the name of the game and with apologies to Gordon Gekko, it's anything but a positive trait. Norris followed the Emile Zola School of Naturalism, which was all for getting reality on paper, but it favored less than fun stuff - misery, poverty, vice, violence, racism.

Norris also studied at the School of Determinism, which said that whatever traits you were born with, there's pretty much no escape. So if you have Swiss-German blood (the female protagonist), you'll be predisposed to be miserly with your accumulated riches or if daddy was a drunken, idiotic ne'er-do-well (McTeague), you're screwed.

A sort-of non-spoilerish summary: McTeague is a big, slow-witted (Norris likes to often use the words like "stupid" and "idiot" to describe the big lug) dentist, who falls in love with Trina, who's kind of cute and has a big, head of raven-colored hair.



They get engaged. She hits the lottery for $5000. Marcus, McTeague's bestest pal, who originally had a thing for her and set them up, gets jealous because he could have had the money (Hi there, Mr. Greed). McTeague and his pal wrestle at a picnic, it goes too far, Marcus pulls a Mike Tyson and bites McTeague's ear and McTeague does a "brainbuster" on him in retaliation and now they're not pals anymore, but bitter enemies.



McTeague and Trina get married, but she doesn't want to spend any of her lottery money because she's a Swiss-German miser (Hey, Greed), which works out okay until the San Fransiscan Dental board say that McTeague can't be a dentist anymore because the Three Stooges School of Dentistry does not in fact exist.

From there, things devolve in a rather quick, bloody and ham-fisted way.



More stuff:

You can't talk about greed without rolling out the obligatory Jewish character and the formulaic anti-Semitic garbage.

It seems that drinking steam beer (Mmmm beer) and putting billiard balls in your mouth was the height of jackassary back in the day.

Rolling around in bed, naked, with your gold pieces is pretty smexy. Unless you're a dude…



This is a grim book with little humor and no one comes out unscathed and I was wavering between 3 and 4 stars but the last fifth of the book solidified the rating. With some stunning literary imagery and a perfect ending, it proved that no matter where you go - from the big city to the desert - you're always alone with your conscience - your greedy, pre-determined conscience.