Emile Zola: Germinal

Up until the last chapter, I was prepared to write about how masterfully Zola ropes the readers in, enticing her or him with the prospect that things might just turn out--even though he clearly has no such intention.  This was my take on L'assommoir, and combined with his thoroughly believable, though not necessarily relatable, characters I saw a pattern developing.  Even the ostensible villains of the novel react in perfectly human ways to representatively human circumstances.  The mine collapse in Part VI seemed the perfect resolution to this vector, and this gutsy and unexpected turn reminded me of The Mill on the Floss or Empire Falls.  Had he stopped there, I would have put him right up there with Balzac, ahead of Flaubert and Stendahl, as the very best of French writers.

But he didn't stop.  He went on for another hundred or so pages, and that last chapter undid everything.  Whereas L'assommoir sacrificed nothing to Zola's social ideas, and in fact worked with them nicely, it would seem that he simply could not help himself in Germinal.  What was an inspiring narrative that needed no help to make its point, turned into a manifesto.  I don't like being told what to think; it insults my pride of readership and chafes against my rather typically American rebelliousness.  It is for this reason that Germinal, though it could have been even better than L'assommoir, wound up being merely The Jungle.