Dragon's Teeth

Lanny Budd, grandson of an American arms manufacturer and husband, by wealthy marriage, to the heiress Irma Barnes, spends Dragon's Teeth moving fluidly between two worlds his in-laws would rather keep separate: the moneyed leisure of interwar Europe and the socialist convictions Lanny has held since his youth. Sinclair uses Lanny's improbable social range, art dealer, Roosevelt sympathizer, occasional confidant of Nazi officials, as a device for putting the reader in the room for history rather than reading about it afterward: Lanny meets Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels directly, cultivating relationships with men he finds repugnant because those relationships are the only leverage he has.

That leverage gets tested when Freddi Robin, the son of a Dutch Jewish family connected to Lanny's own household, is swept up in the June 1934 Night of the Long Knives purge and disappears into Dachau. Sinclair spends the novel's back half tracking Lanny's increasingly desperate, and increasingly compromising, effort to extract Freddi using exactly the connections his wife's money and his own diplomatic charm have bought him, a plot that lets Sinclair dramatize, with unusual precision for 1942, how completely ordinary bureaucratic favor-trading could coexist with, and even enable, industrialized atrocity.

Sinclair published Dragon's Teeth in 1942, only eight years after the events it depicts and while the war it foreshadows was still underway, giving the novel an unusual documentary urgency for historical fiction: Lanny's private horror at what he witnesses in Germany carries the weight of reportage rather than hindsight, since Sinclair himself was writing without knowing how the larger catastrophe would end.

Lanny's marriage to Irma gives Sinclair a second register for the same argument he makes through Lanny's politics: Irma's wealth insulates her from caring what happens in Germany at all, and Sinclair uses her growing impatience with Lanny's obsession over Freddi to dramatize how comfortably American capital could simply look away from what European capital was funding. The marriage strains without breaking, a domestic subplot that keeps the novel's political argument from ever feeling abstract.