Rating: 
Summary: Hidden Masterpiece
Review: This is, hands down, the best book I have read in all of my 10 years in college. It was first forced upon me in American Realism 340, alongside Chopin and Dreiser, but Norris shined above them all. The characters are incredible over the top examples of the absurd, brilliant in their simplicity and endearing because of their sincerity. The story is unpredictable, the ending is shocking, brutal, and will stick with you. There is so much to think about and decipher: ie. McTeague's canary, Marcus, the old couple; every facet of this book is fascinating, every page inticing. It had me up till four in the morning finishing it. An addictive treasure I recommend to everyone.
Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest American novels.
Review: This story was written in 1899. It is about Macteague, a dentist operating a clinic in a flat, which doubles as his residence, in a lower middle class neighborhood in San Fransisco. Macteague is not a licensed dentist. He learned the trade by being an assistant to a quack dentist who rescued him from a miserable life slaving at the Big Dipper mine in Nevada. His intellectual faculties seem to have been considerably dulled by his hard life.Well his existence is permanently shattered by the appearance of Miss Trina Sieppe, cousin and love interest of his best friend Marcus Schouler. Macteague has not had much experience with women before this and seems to be scared of them but she fully awakens the sex instinct in him. One day he is so much overcome by her youthful, girl-next-door beauty that he cannot restrain himself from briefly kissing and caressing her while she is unconscious in the dental chair under Novocain. He clumsily asks her to marry him sometimes after this and this scares her greatly but after a while they become friends. Macteague admits to Marcus his affection for Trina and Marcus yields her to Macteague with a magnanimity that does not last long. Well Trina and Mac eventually become an item. Macteague again forces himself on her, this time when she is conscious, while they are sitting along at a bus station and after some resistance she yields herself to him, apparently out of a perverse need to be possessed by a big strong man. Macteague is indeed a very huge blond haired and mustached man with a big "square-cut head" and "salient jaw" and "mallet-like fists." Norris never tires of mentioning this. Macteague is in brief the very specimen of raw nordic manhood. Well, this period of their courtship may contain the best writing of the book. We meet Trina's parents, with their thick German accents. There is the scene at the park where Mr. Sieppe and Trina's younger brother August quarrel violently. There is the scene at the theater where Macteague laughs heartily at the bad comedic performances and where August (or Owgooste as Norris begins to call him in imitation of how Mr. and Mrs Sieppe with their thick accents pronounce his name) wets himself. Well, just before they are married Trina wins 5,000 dollars in a lottery. This releases an insane jealousy in Marcus for he could be Trina's husband and have that money if he hadn't ceded her to Macteague. Several violent incidents between the two follow over the next few years. Well, one day after they have had several happy years of marriage, they are visited by Marcus who seems unusually friendly and says that he is going down to southeastern California to become a rancher. Well, shortly after, Macteague receives notice in the mail that the city government has discovered that he has been practicing for years without a lisence and orders him to stop. Trina suspects that Marcus alerted the authorities to this before he left. Well things really go down hill after this. Trina's fetish for hoarding her money in her trunk below her wedding dress explodes and she lies to Macteague about the state of their finances. She herself makes some money by making Noah's Ark animals for her rich uncle's wholesale toy store. She refuses to disburse any money to him, a pathological miser she has become and he takes to hitting her and grabbing her fingers and chewing on them to make her give him money. They have long since moved out of the dental quarters to a much cheaper flat in the same building and they eventually move into a room in the house of Zerkow, the late junk dealer. It is there that Mac steals her money in her trunk and runs off...Well to make a long story short, at the end of the story Trina is dead and Macteague is fleeing through the Southwestern desert , even running away from a gold find that he helps make with a man he meets at a rural California Diner. Most poignantly, he will not give up his old canary in its gilt cage, the only thing he has from his remaining from his prosperous days. He carries it along with him, along with Trina's old lottery money. He has some vague visceral feeling that the police are on his heels. He ends up trying to travel through the Valley of Death Desert, trying to reach Mexico, where he runs into Marcus who.....in any case Norris describes his characters and their actions with great vividness and reality. The last part of the novel is rather slow reading but Norris's description of Macteague's hopeless flight through the indescribably vast and infernal deserts of the SW U.S. is really well crafted. The novel for its first two-thirds centers around life at the apartment building and features additional characters like Old Grannis and Miss Baker and Maria Macapa, the Latina maid of the building. Maria marries Zerkow the junk dealer who eventually kills her.
Rating:
Summary: Like a symphony
Review: To me this first realistic and naturalistic American novel is like a three-movement classical symphony, the first movement (chapters 1 - 12) being a relatively light-hearted Allegro picturing the friendship of McTeague and Marcus and McTeague's marriage to Trina. There would be a few dissonances foreshadowing the events to come. The second movement(chapters 13 - 19), a funeral march, Marcia funebre, would then represent the progressive souring of McTeague's relationship to Trina and his friendship to Marcus, beginning with McTeague's loss of his job as a dentist and ending with the terrible detection of Trina's body by a schoolgirl. A funeral march would express the initial catastrophe as well as the final death appropriately. The last movement (from chapter 20 to the catastrophic end) would be a Prestissimo ghost dance appropriate to the desolate scene of Death Valley, and dying away in pianissimo dissonances....What would I like this music to sound? There is one example I could think of, which is Prokofiev's ballet music to Romeo and Juliet. Everything is there---gaiety, love, hate, catastrophe, fate, death. Unfortunately, no living composer, American or otherwise, seems equal to the task, but perhaps in the future.....
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