McTeague: A novel by Frank Norris

McTeague by Frank Norris

I come to this through the classic movie Greed by Erich von Stroheim. This is a silent movie that is notorious as one of the movies cut into a shorter version by it’s production company.  We don’t have the whole vision of the director and much of the footage was discarded. Nevertheless it’s a great movie and I have watched it more than once, but this novel that the movie was adapted from is so much more and beyond the film in greatness.

This supports my notion that film is a step back as an art form compared to novels. Film is rather good with action of any sort, with it’s old standbys, sex and violence. But it is terribly clumsy when it comes to the subte in human life, like our rich lives of thought. Fiction writing can easily present thought while film often must revert to writing to show thought in the form of narration. Of course text is not thought, but another representation. What is thought? I’m not exactly, sure but text seems best at expressing it.

If one wants to read this fine novel and are interested in the movie Greed too, I would suggest first seeing Greed and then reading the book. I think there is less disappointment with that mode of consumption since movies are most always less than, a sort of graphic comic of the original.

Greed was not a bad name for the movie. The novel is all about greed, the love and lust for money. It is a very American story set in San Francisco, about as far as one can get in the westward stomp across the conquested continent. California had a big push of white settlement after the gold strikes there 50 years before the publication of this 1899 novel. It’s characters are the typical immigrants and their heirs still at it, still wanting to add gold, money, status and meaning to empty lives and hurting one another in the process.

I looked into the biography of Frank Norris. He died very young, at 32 of appendicitis. McTeague is the product of a man in his 20s. It is also a landmark in Naturalism in USA literature.

I am drawn to Naturalism. I have read all of Theodore Dreiser’s fiction and love his work. I probably ought to look into Zola.

With McTeague the social realism of the piece is never overtly political, he is not pitching a particular political point of view, such as, say, Upton Sinclair with Socialism. Frank Norris just lays it all out there and let’s the reader come to their own conclusions with hints of conditioning and life setting having driven the characters to be what they are.

It is a brilliantly involving and pleasurable read even with all the misery. The tale he tells is a worthy one and remains relevant into the 21st Century almost 120 years since publication. That is because the issues remain and people are as they were and maybe even worse now.  Anyone who has been in a relationship with unequal economic assets might find something to relate to here. The major plot line involves one partner having money but afraid, or for whatever other reason, will not or cannot share with her husband McTeague who is a big not so smart uneducated man who had a good income before a change that ruins his life. This can be deadly in a relationship which the novel illustrates in no uncertain terms. The novel contains serious and violent marital conflict. McTeague abuses his wife who cannot share her money. She is driven to live in poverty to “save” more.  

This is a product of the 1890s and does contain some of the stereotypes of the era. There is a greedy “Jew” rag merchant, but everyone else is greedy too and he is not rich or controlling anyone. Just another victim of a systematic insanity.

It’s my first reading of Norris and I loved it. I will return to him later for sure.