In the Library
McTeague
Frank Norris, 1899
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 8 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 22
- Length
- Length 113k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Germinal
Émile Zola
Germinal does the same thing, but from the coalface rather than the dental parlor, tracing how hunger and greed curdle ordinary people into violence.
£1.99
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie does the same thing, but follows appetite upward instead of down, watching a woman's wants pull her toward the city's glittering promise.
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Thérèse Raquin
Émile Zola
Zola's Thérèse Raquin is the naturalist model Norris learned from, a shabby marriage above a Paris shop sliding into murder and animal guilt.
£1.99
About the book
Steam beer on a Sunday, a concertina played badly and with enormous pleasure, and an unlicensed dentist on Polk Street whose whole ambition in life is a giant gilded tooth to hang outside his window. Then Trina wins five thousand dollars in a lottery, and Frank Norris begins the patient, appalling work of showing what money does to people who have never had any. She will not spend a cent of it: she takes to spreading the gold pieces across her bed and lying down among them in the dark. He takes to drink, and then to biting her fingers. What makes the book unbearable is not that they turn on each other but how reasonably each step follows from the one before, as though brutality were simply the shape a life settles into once the veneer wears through. Norris walks them out of the city and into the white glare of Death Valley, where you can be the richest man alive and still die of thirst.