McTeague

Norris's naturalism is explicitly biological: McTeague is introduced as a creature of "heredity" before he's introduced as a person, a hulking, slow-witted dentist whose "foul, stupid, and vicious" instincts wait beneath a placid surface like sediment, ready to be stirred. Trina undergoes the more disturbing transformation — a prim, thrifty fiancée who wins five thousand dollars in a lottery and calcifies, over the course of the novel, into a genuine miser, sleeping with her gold coins in bed and polishing them for the pleasure of touch alone. Money in this novel doesn't corrupt characters so much as it activates what was dormant in them; Norris is less interested in a fall from grace than in a slow uncovering of what was always underneath.

The recurring motifs of teeth and gilding do the book's symbolic labor: McTeague's profession, his enormous gilded tooth-shaped shop sign, and Trina's gold-hoarding all point toward civilization as a kind of dentistry — a cosmetic fix applied over something raw and animal that was never actually removed. The canary Trina keeps caged throughout the novel, chirping obliviously through domestic violence and squalor, becomes a small, mordant emblem of blind, self-enclosed appetite persisting no matter what happens around it — and Norris carries the bird all the way to the novel's final page.

Norris studied under a professor steeped in Émile Zola's fiction at Berkeley and later at Harvard, and openly modeled his ambitions on Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, which traced how heredity and environment determined a family's fate across generations with the supposed rigor of a laboratory experiment. McTeague is Norris's most direct transplant of that method to American soil — a plot engineered to prove a thesis about determinism rather than to follow characters wherever free will might take them. Norris died young, at thirty-two, having completed only two volumes of a planned Trilogy of the Wheat (The Octopus and The Pit) that aimed to apply the same deterministic lens to American wheat farming and market speculation, but McTeague remains his purest, most unsparing statement of naturalist doctrine.

Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent film adaptation, Greed, is now more famous among cinephiles than the novel that inspired it: Stroheim shot a version reportedly running over nine hours, intending to film nearly every scene of the book, before MGM recut it down to about two, destroying the excised footage in the process. What survives is still considered one of American silent cinema's great achievements and one of its great losses, a fittingly naturalist fate for a film about obsession and diminishment — a masterpiece ground down by the same commercial machinery it depicted.