Wow. This was the least-enjoyable book I’ve read in a long while. It reads like a horror-dystopian film with a green-black tint over every scene, and characters with hideous stage makeup that creates the fantastical and nightmarish aesthetic. I only like horror novels with a redeeming lead character, which McTeague lacked. Speaking broadly, it seems there was a shift in literature between the time of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when the protagonists were good, honorable, upstanding people, and the time of McTeague, when the main characters are, to a person, dishonorable and unlikeable and only degenerate throughout the book. Perhaps this adds to the realism, or interest of the books, because it would be trite to make a character worth rooting for. But I think a book isn’t worth reading if the protagonist isn’t worth rooting for.
How in the world does this make the list of contenders for the Great American Novel? What distinctly American themes are there? Perhaps Frank Norris thought overwhelming and irrational greed is distinctly American, but this can’t be true. McTeague doesn’t begin to get into real trouble until he loses his profession, so the theme of the book can’t even be about ostentatious acquisition, which may be more common in America then elsewhere, if not distinctly American. Instead, the characters’ moral deterioration mirrors the descent of their physical well being—and living in squalor can hardly be distinctly American. Perhaps here McTeague’s point is that the poor outside of America don’t aspire to wealth, so Trina wouldn’t be tempted to hoard her gold as she does, and McTeague and Marcus would be more content with their meager lifestyles. That idea is just depressing enough that I might be onto something.
And now for what I dislike about the book’s style: the repetition is weird. Norris introduced each character with a descriptive paragraph. And then, each time a character is mentioned, Norris repeats, seemingly verbatim (although I didn’t verify), that descriptive paragraph. I suppose I don’t hate it as much as the substance of the book, but I don’t see that it adds interest except by making me wonder what Norris was hoping to accomplish with such figurative language.
I looked this up, and apparently it is a motif, which creates a sense of inevitability. Norris did mention somewhere in his book that McTeague and Trina were doomed from the start based on their respective innate characteristics, and this strikes me as decidedly un-American. Distinctly American themes ought to involve people picking themselves up by their bootstraps and forging ahead bravely, no matter the trials they face, preferably with a family to help them along. Not characters who can do nothing but fail and aren’t even responsible for their own bad decisions.
There actually were two decent characters in this book: Mr. Grannis and Ms. Baker, the old couple who spent years loving each other from their separate rooms in the flat. Then they just disappear from the book so we can focus on McTeague, Trina, and Marcus suffering from their own greed and anger and then dying brutal, painful deaths.