Review: The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

It's always fun to review famous books that everyone has heard of. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle made the world familiar with muckraking journalism, and shocked the country into adopting somewhat improved food safety standards. President Roosevelt, we're told, was swayed by discovering, from passages of the book, what goes into embalmed meat and sausage. It seems safe to say that he didn't read the rest of it. The Jungle may deserve a review for the plot that no one talks about, of which only a small fraction is spent in the Chicago meat empire. It follows the first few years in the life of Jurgis Rudkus upon immigration to America from Lithuania. Sinclair takes us through a handy travelogue of institutionalized hardship, starting with extortion on the passage, through the subtle or overt systematic coercion and humiliation and pestilence that bedeviled the teeming ranks of unskilled labor in the meat industry in 1904. He'd originally centered it on the failed meat-packer's strike of that year, but the book takes Jurgis and his family through several other modes of contemporary employment (factory work, begging, prostitution, crime, vagrancy, politics), all born of, and failing, their good intentions to live as decently and independently as they can conceive.

It ends with an improvement on their conceptions, a veritable epiphany. The Jungle is a Socialist marketing pitch, a surprising survivor in the American canon. Poor Jurgis is slated to experience every version of the underside of the machine that Sinclair can think of to add, a sort of pilgrim's progress that is maybe not strict allegory, but runs at least as a series of representative anecdotes. (I am sure there's an appropriate literary term.)

I think that there is some real conflict with Sinclair the novelist and Sinclair the propagandist, to the detriment of both missions. The book opens with Jurgis' wedding, the only scene of joy and vitality before the ending, and once it ends, there is only a dismantling of the happiness that developed in that moment, with each new subtraction coming through like a shot in the gut. But there is only so much there to take apart, and when it's gone, we find that Sinclair still has half a book to go. Cool lefty types remark with regret that people remember the horrible abuses of the meat industry but neglect to take home what it did to reveal the anguish of working people, but it's not entirely the fault of the reader. Once Jurgis leaves Packingtown, once the last connection to his family goes under the mire in yet another tragedy, his story gets a whole lot less immediate, and any mystery we have invested in the happiness of these characters vanishes under the weight of obvious authorial intent. The student correctly sniffs out a lesson coming at this point, and grows bored. A novel is an excellent medium to convey an individual story, but this everyman thing loses its punch for needing to include, well, every man.

As writing goes, an occasional moments of satisfaction, however impoverished, could have gone far to accentuating the far larger negatives that Sinclair was after. The only positive outlet for Jurgis, the author lectures, was chasing the hazy phantoms of joy at the bottom of a bottle. Sinclair lectures a good deal, and while his appeals to human dignity are strong, his reversion to Christian-style morality (temperance, abstinance, moderation) are tedious. The introduction (written by Maura Spiegel, in the B&N cheapo edition) notes that the author did not describe his characters with a rich inner life, but instead went for a more observational style that was the fashion of some of his contemporaries. But this is no vivid little Chekhov-style tableau we're talking. There is no shortage of moralizing and psychological mechanics, they just happen to all come from the author instead of the characters. The editorializing doesn't go down much easier for the obvious distance that exists between the supercilious Sinclair and his earthy protagonist. The author has got every article of mild slang doubt-quoted, sniffs at every hint of debauchery, is affronted by black people, adds exclamations to every larger observation, and dear-readers us nearly to death. The climax is a speech, and the denouement is a goddamn lecture, in which we're reminded, sadly without irony, that like many another ethos, national Socialism offers a brilliant critique, but a provides a very sketchy prescription. The faith by which the world should fall into place under its influence seems rather quaint with a century's hindsight.

I like novels, and I don't mind polemics if the writing is good, but this combination felt a bit distasteful to me, even though Upton Sinclair is good enough to put satisfying thoughts and words and plots together. And I am sympathetic to his criticism (even if I lack his faith in a Socialist panacea), so it's not really the content that's the problem. If this thing were a satire—or showed any trace of humor whatever—then it could have carried a lot more weight with me. It may be just my own weird predilections.

[Edited slightly, with apologies to the English language.]