The Normal Times

Upton Sinclair, 1906

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“There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind of prison where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.”

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

This is probably Upton Sinclair’s most read book. He famously spent seven weeks working in the meat packing plants of the Chicago stockyards. A muckraker at the peak of that journalistic trend, they were the sensationalists of their era. Always sniffing around to expose the evils of the nation’s most gruesome institutions. They shock, they sadden, and in Sinclair’s case, a fraction of these stories are usually quite engaging before they descend into beating the reader over the head with the author’s favorite cause du jour.

The main character in this mess is a young Lithuanian man who has immigrated to America along with his large combined and multi-generational family. They end up in Chicago, following promises of plentiful work and high wages. Despite losing half of the family’s savings to nefarious tricksters along the way, the young foreigner remains youthfully optimistic.

The family acquires a shitty little home in a dubious rent-to-own scheme. As they settle into life in the new world, they endure regular bouts of poor health and disgusting jobs that they are completely dependent on. Even amidst the joyous event of childbirth, everyone is anxious about missing too much work.

They all live like rats for a long time, then the young man gets his break when he’s invited to join a union. Except not really, because in this mustache -twisting villain’s paradise it’s all a scam. The young foreigner attends every meeting and works tirelessly to learn English so he can understand the union literature. Even with his weak English, he figures out that he was duped into a vote-buying scheme.

Oh well, onward and upward, or more like downward. Most of the family members suffer a sudden onslaught of work injuries. Our young foreigner also succumbs to a fit of illness which costs him a job. After recovery, being the only non-injured one, he must find work in the limited options. So he sinks to the lowest low, he takes a job in the fertilizer factory. He also gets really into liquor drinking.

This works out okay enough for a while until he beats the shit out of his wife’s boss for getting way too handsy. This lands him in jail on Christmas Eve. While he awaits trial, he makes a new friend out of his cellmate and learns about the benefits of criminal enterprise. After a month in jail, the young foreigner is released. He treks on foot through Chicago’s winter hell back to his home, only to find his family has been evicted, and the house sold.

He manages to track down most of them, but nothing that follows is anything good. With every tragedy he drinks a bit more and a bit more.

After one close relative’s death too many, the young man has had enough. He walks right out of Chicago and starts hopping trains. He spends the summer wandering the hinterlands; working, foraging, and stealing to live. Cold eventually drives him back to Chicago, apparently. After all, Chicago *is* a famously comfortable oasis in the winter months, right? I should have known Upton Sinclair was a disconnected freak around this point, but I’m a glutton for punishment.

Back in Chicago, he lives off day labor and begging, the latter of which soon lands him back in jail. Coincidentally, his old jail buddy is also back in again. What a world. His cellmate once again regales him with the virtues of criminality, and this time he takes him up on the offer to pair up. Finally, the young foreigner is flourishing. Crime pays about twenty times his old factory wages and provides a far more useful education as he settles into the warm embrace of Chicago’s seedy underbelly. For instance, he learns all about the substantial corruption of the police and politicians that make the world so very dirty.

This is exactly where the book should have ended. Had it stopped right here, this would have been a fantastic book, a real Great American Novel. But that’s not what happened, because this is Upton I’ve-never-worked-a-real-job-and-love-socialism Sinclair’s book.

So at this point, everything was going pretty god damn good for this dude, considering his previous struggles. He’s got money a-plenty. Then one cold winter night he ducks into a building to seek refuge from the cold. It turns out to be a meeting hall, a *socialist* meeting hall. Immediately, he is enraptured by the speeches he listens to and the brochures he reads. It is this newfound enthusiasm that drives him to relocate his lost family members (not, ya know, him finally having a bunch of money to help them out, or at least to pay for the cab fare to get to them), so he can find them and tell them the good news about socialism. After some lukewarm reunions, he takes a job in a hotel run by a socialist and dedicates all his free time to this shiny new cause.

If this sounds awkwardly out of place or poorly introduced to the plot, that’s because it is. It comes out of fucking nowhere and it is god awful. I think you’d have to already be really really into socialism already to find any value in it, and even then I can’t see how it wouldn’t bore you to death.

I’d guess, given the two books of his that I’ve read and his personal history of dropping out of Columbia because they didn’t have classes on socialism and losing elections while running on socialist tickets, I’d guess that Sinclair ruins all his stories with this silly shit. It’s too bad. What I’ve read of his always starts out with tactful prose and immersive world building that stays constant up until he decided that it was time to inject his favorite thing into it, typically after the reader is already two-thirds of the way through. Upton Sinclair’s writing is like an inverse of that scummy promo that offers to give you a free set of golf clubs if you listen to an hour long sales pitch, except with him you get a free sales pitch after you’ve already spent a week reading his book.

This is why we shouldn’t encourage dorky people to write books. They can’t finish them right so they finish them with an awkward shrug. Stephen King did this with the Dark Tower series. Chuck Pahlahniuk and Neil Gaiman finish by deliberately confusing readers with a cavalcade of ill-crafted images. Upton Sinclair can’t finish so he hopes he can at least use the sunk-cost fallacy against his readers to make them sit through another lecture on socialism.

Just look at this:

One could not stand and watch very long without being philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe… Each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, all the while a black shadow hung over him, and a horrid fate in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, all his protests, his screams were nothing to it. It did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life.

Pretty decent writing, then he went and threw a wet blanket all over it.

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