required reading

L'Assomoir is the story of Gervaise, a washerwoman, her marriage to Coupeau, and their descent into poverty, precipitated by both accident and heredity.

L'Assomoir isn't polite 19th century fiction, a la Austen, or Eliot. I think that I had ceased to think that anything but contemporary fiction could shock or unnerve or depress, but Zola's depiction of the squalour and depravity of the Parisian underclasses is dirty and gritty and abhorrent. And the beast is in the details of description, waiting to ambush you with something that doesn't seem time-bound or blessedly outdated, but horribly possible. Consider this small aside on one of the minor characters in the novel, Lalie:

Her father had invented another fun game. He heated some pennies till they were red hot on the stove and laid them on the chimney piece. He then summoned Lalie and told her go and buy some bread. The child unsuspiciously took up the coins, uttered a little shriek and dropped them, shaking her poor burned fingers.

Then he would fly off into a rage. What did she mean by such nonsense? She had thrown away the money and lost it, and he threatened her with a hiding if she did not find the money instantly. The poor child hesitated; he gave her a cuff on the side of the head. With silent tears streaming down her cheeks she would pick up the pennies and toss them from hand to hand to cool them as she went down the long flights of stairs.

What struck me, from reading this immediately after Human Traces, was the difference in ambition between Gervaise and the young, earnest doctors of Faulks' novel. In contrast to their eager desire to find the origin of and cure for human madness, Gervaise declares her aims in life to be

"...to live a quiet life and always have enough to eat—a clean place to live in—with a comfortable bed, a table and a chair or two. Yes, I would like to bring my children up in that way and see them good and industrious. I should not like to run the risk of being beaten—no, that would not please me at all!"

She hesitated, as if to find something else to say, and then resumed:

"Yes, and at the end I should wish to die in my bed in my own home!"

Zola repeats Gervaise's assertion twice more early in the novel, so that it is well established in the readers' minds. As the novel progresses towards its denouement it becomes clear that Gervaise will not realize all her ambitions, and the reader wonders instead if the irony will be played out fully and Gervaise's ruin will be complete.

Whilst Faulks' novel turns around two dry, academic, carefully structured speeches given by Jacques and Thomas to assembled guests at their sanatorium, the set pieces in Zola's novel involve a ridiculous wedding procession through the Louvre, and a chapter long description of an excessive and sordid feast. Ibsen said that Zola descended into the sewer to bathe in the filfth. By contrast to the squalor and degradation that Zola depicts, Faulks' novel seems to be a sprayed clean and carefully wiped version of reality, whereas Zola clings to the corners of my mind; I feel like I've got dirt under my fingernails.