Frank Norris and the Brute (part two)

In part one of my posting about Frank Norris, we looked at his masterwork, "McTeague". In this post, we shall lift up "Vandover and the Brute" an obvious inspiration behind my first novel, "The Missionary and the Brute".

In the last of Norris' novels (published posthumously), he revisits the idea of the duality of humankind. How we are often faced with conflicting impulses within ourselves. In many ways, this feels like an assured, and vastly different retelling of the classic Robert Louis Stevenson opus, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Unlike that work however, there is no John Utterson to represent us - the gentle reader - with a sense of normalcy and we are left with an unreliable, almost unlikeable protagonist, Vandover.

Surprisingly, it works.

We are expected to be disgusted and horrified by his actions - and we most certainly are.

The title character is a recent Harvard grad who despite his economic class travels the dark streets of San Francisco with two friends. They are slumming in the absolute worst way - partaking of drink and drugs and women of every ilk in the very worst parts of town. They have a sense of extreme entitlement that comes with genetic-determined class and easy money. But they squander it all away incrementally upon their descent. Vandover moreso than the others, gives in freely to the wolf that he sees within himself. His actions are execrable and his degeneration so extreme, that it is only at the very end that Norris gives us a literal bread-crumb of hope.

In "The Missionary and the Brute" we look at a similar human duality as it impacts our characters' choices. It would not be incorrect to refer to Jadwin Ross as being akin to Vandover in his actions - though not perhaps in the way you may be thinking. It is not a spoiler to tell you that pretty much any assumption you make from reading the book's marketing blurb - or even from your early readings of the chapters of the book - may be entirely incorrect.

Or not.

It's hard to say. I just know I worked very hard to keep the elements of the story flowing with surprises happening on every level. If you take nothing for granted and trust not the narrative point of view, you should be fine. For me, there is nothing more reliably interesting in fiction than an unreliable narrator.

That being said, there is certainly an element of the wolf at play within "The Missionary and the Brute". Dramatically and significantly so. Ahem, there is that figure of the lion on the cover, you know. But - as has been so appropriately stated by others, I run before my horse to market...

Frank Norris and the Brute (Part one)

In a previous post, I wrote briefly about the importance of Frank Norris' writings on my work. Today I'm going to expound on that a bit.

I have to admit to coming to Norris late in my reading life. Prior to coming fully on board and becoming immersed in his work, I had resisted every futile attempt to encounter his work. Part of the problem was that I picked up a copy of "The Octopus" early on and had a devil of a time getting past the first few long-descriptive, small, dense-printed pages. I gave a few grudging attempts at forging through and actually borrowed it from the library twice and returned it having only read the first part of the first chapter.

I wanted to like it. But couldn't make it.

The subject - the effect of the railroad on wheat farmers in California definitely appealed to me in sort of a John Steinbeck/Upton Sinclair way. I was hoping for a "Oil!" type manuscript or maybe "In Dubious Battle". What I got instead was a description of a place. Or so I thought. Oh, had I but soldiered on...

What turned the tide for me was reading "McTeague" first. I picked up one of those lovely Norton Critical Editions that has lots of peripheral reading material in the back related to the subject (sort of like a pre-blog blog...) Unlike my previous Norris foray, "McTeague" engaged me from the start. "McTeague" is one of those disturbing novels from the early 20th Century that features non-idealized characters and characterizations. McTeague was not a warm and lovely protagonist - far from it. He did not live in a world we aspire to join. Instead, he was deeply flawed and presented warts and all as a sort of observation. It was not quite realism as it had a lot of overtly symbolic scenes within it, but it inhabited a natural world that was indeed real - if unwelcome.

And the characters evolved or devolved. None stayed the same. Each changed - usually for the worse - in front of our very eyes. Hauntingly so.

Through the novel, we watch as Mac (McTeague) slowly degenerates into a paranoid, quarrelsome brute of a man wholly unable to control his own violent impulses. The transformation is believable and heart wrenching in equal measure. He slowly loses his grip on all that he once adored - eventually allowing his whiskey-fueled anger to step in the way of his friendships, his business, his stature, his marriage and ultimately his life. As Mac plummets down an abyss of his own making toward a baser, more animalistic, survivalist self, we watch a similar transformative path taken by his wife Trina in a different way. Slowly she loses touch with reality as she knew it and falls prey to an absurd obsession with the gold coins she has secretly hidden from her husband. At one point, she spreads them over her bed and rolls amongst them in a scene of abhorrent sensual greed. Symbolic? - yep. Disturbing? - of course. Visually dramatic and mesmerizingly memorable? - absolutely!

For me, the sheer concept of McTeague succumbing to his innate animal instinct (an idea that Norris embellished with thoughts based on early criminologist Cesare Lombroso's work) was so intense that it immediately drew me to Norris' other works.

Quickly I collected all of his novels and discovered that had I but read a few pages further in "The Octopus" I would have discovered what I now consider to be one of my favorite novels of all time. While "The Octopus", and "The Pit" were two parts of a planned trilogy about the growing, sales and distribution of wheat - and have informed a future novel I am writing called "The Straw Man" - it is "McTeague" and another of Norris' novels that have most directly influenced the subject and subtext of "The Missionary and the Brute".

In part two of this posting, we shall look at "Vandover and the Brute"...

What's in a name?

So, what's in a name? Quite a lot actually. Choosing a title for a book is a tricky business. It should theoretically entice the prospective reader into opening the book while not giving away too much or too little of the context of the novel at hand. With "The Missionary and the Brute" I carefully considered various options before settling in on this one.

The other serious contender for title was initially "African Psycho", which seemed to accurately underscore the serial killer aspect of the tale while placing it in the appropriate locale. Ultimately I decided against this option because it seemed a bit sensational and misleading perhaps. Not that "The Missionary and the Brute" isn't sensational in its way too. It is. But that's not the point of it - it's subtext is more complicated and philosophical than that.

It also was too closely attuned to Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho" for comfort. Not that this connection is not apropos. It is as well. I consider "American Psycho" to be one of the great American novels for a variety of reasons - and will compare and contrast similarities and differences between Ellis' novel and mine at some later point in this blog. It is definitely one of the conceptual godfathers of my work and I am unabashedly a fan.

But I wanted something more ambiguous and yet apt. I took as my guiding light a different authorial godfather - Frank Norris. Most folks frankly haven't given Norris his due in my opinion. His work is disarmingly complex, and yet accessible. He has a well-honed philosophical bent that plays directly to what I am attempting in this work.

"McTeague" is considered his masterwork, and for me I would tend to agree although I truly love all of his fiction with equal ardor. "The Octopus" and "The Pit" are my two favorites. And of course, "Vandover and the Brute" has informed my mindset and my work greatly. In "McTeague" (which was turned into the classic silent film, "Greed" by Eric von Stroheim), the titular character struggles with competing forces within himself. Perhaps it can be simplified to the civilized self and the animal self, but that is merely a structure.

That too, is the underlying premise behind my work. In my telling - we have characters who hear the still, small voice of their conscience and those who hear a much different bestial voice. Those voices can be summarized blithely as being those of a missionary and those of a brute. In Norris' "Vandover and the Brute", the brute is that part of Vandover which can not control its animal impulses - its sexuality, its self-preservation and raw instinct. In concept, it is a masterful philosophical MMA event that is not unlike Freudian battles betwixt ego, superego and id. The brute is the unrelenting id. The missionary is the superego.

Of course, it may also be a double entendre in my case. There may indeed be two separate characters - one a missionary and one a brute who engage a danse macabre - a pas de deux of sorts that plays out in front of our wondering eyes. Perhaps.

But before we get too close to solving crimes and revealing too much - let me close by saying that for me, the title "The Missionary and the Brute" is all of those things as well as a not so subtle homage to Norris himself. I tend to toss in sly (and not so sly) literary allusions along as I am writing - and am more than happy to lift up the work of an under appreciated giant of the literary world.