Frank Norris: A Life by Joseph R. McElrath Jr., Jesse S. Crisler

Abstract

B o o k r e v ie w s 3 1 3 eloquence” critic William Bevis writes in Ten Tough Tips (1990) characterizes much Montana literature. The epilogue recapitulates, in reverse order, those two momentous trips on horseback from Rossie’s youth, and the novel ends back at the Neversweat. One-room schoolhouses still exist in the rural West, though they decline in number, and, for most, they connote the past rather than the present; epic horse drives belong to the past. Both writers fondly glance back to the recent (or not so recent) past, and depending upon one’s taste for such fond glances, one will variably savor these fictions. For the most part, I respect and enjoy these evocations of a mostly vanished Nevada and Montana. Fran k N orris: A Life. By Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse S. Crisler. C h icago : U n iversity o f Illin ois Press, 2006. 492 pages, $38.00. Reviewed by Harriet Rafter San Francisco State U niversity A new biography should draw fresh attention to its subject, and Frank Norris (1870-1902) certainly deserves to be better known. A t his death, this impor­ tant western American novelist left six novels, including the lurid McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), which delights and absorbs even reluctant student readers. John Steinbeck adapted some of his best scenes—Jody’s antici­ pated mouse hunt in “The Leader of the People” and the tractor scene from The Grapes of Wrath (1939)— from Norris’s The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), arguably the great California novel. Norris was a journalist as well; he covered the Boer and Spanish-American wars and in many short essays consid­ ered the role of the writer, specifically the western American writer, in the age of Frederic Turner. The writer’s responsibilities are as central to Norris’s think­ ing as to that other philosopher of western writing, Wallace Stegner. Frank Norris: A Life, which took thirty years to write, surely will be the definitive biography for decades. Is it worth the writers’ and readers’ invest­ ment? As my favorite Norris character in The Octopus would say, “In some ways, it is, and then, again, in some ways, it isn’t.” It is aimed at the academic scholar, thus its flaws. McElrath and Crisler so constantly refer to Franklin Walker’s 1932 biography that Walker seems a third author of this one. Sometimes downright dreary is their pursuit of subjects of dubious importance, such as Norris’s distant antecedents or Norris senior’s attitude toward sex. While trying to date exactly when Norris first wrote the sketches that became McTeague and Vandover and the Brute (1914)— which the reader really might like to know— McElrath and Crisler apologize, “Not to try anyone’s patience here ...” In fact, anyone still reading by page 161 has long since surrendered in exchange for the genuinely welcome and reward­ ing explorations of intellectual history and Norris’s writing with which the biography opens and which constitute most of this story of a dedicated and interesting man. 3 1 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 7 Frank Norris lived but thirty-two years and took some time finding himself. He studied painting in Paris and literature at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard, though, like later California writers John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, he took only those courses he felt necessary to become a writer and so graduated from neither university. He was influenced by some of the major forces of his era and their prominent exponents: he studied medievalism and painting in Paris with William Bouguereau, admired the realist style of his mentor, William Dean Howells, and was influenced by Joseph Le Conte’s Berkeley lectures reconciling evolution and religion. He followed the SpanishAmerican War from Key West with fellow reporters Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, and Frederic Remington. He idolized and met Theodore Roosevelt and Cecil Rhodes and parodied but revered Rudyard Kipling. Norris was more at ease than his...