Pig Iron
by . New York: E. P. Dutton & Company. 1926. 12mo. viii+466 pp, $2.00.
INDUSTRIOUSLY, carefully, and with an almost total suppression of humor, Mr. Norris narrates the life of Sam Smith from birth to middle age, consuming something over 220,000 words in the process and never deviating by a hair’s breadth from what may be called Sam’s line of march. For Sam is mentioned at least once on every page, and the forty-odd other characters are presented only as their orbits impinge upon his. The book is strictly the history of Sam during the years between 1865 and 1917, and as history it is decidedly interesting and in some respects remarkable. The question persists, nevertheless, just what ‘reading of life’ the author wished to illustrate by so elaborate a biography.
Perhaps it is mistaken criticism to seek for general ideas in the newer realism. Mr. Norris’s earlier novels have quite clearly been ‘thesis novels,’ and the title which he has given this one, reënforced by a motto from Webster’s Dictionary, is evidently in some sense symbolical of American life. The suggestion is, apparently, that Sam’s development, typical of his times, is arrested in the pig-iron stage and fixed there. His notions of success are crude, untempered, unfinished. They are neither wrought iron nor steel. If this is the meaning of the title, the novel purposes to illustrate the truth, which can never be reëstablished too often, that happiness or success to be real must be spiritual.
Whatever the general ideas that underly it, the story is interesting. To a man who grew up in New York in the eighties and nineties, Sam’s life there during those decades calls up many corroborative memories, and his work and his woes, the places he visits, the church he attends, the persons he knows, all seem authentic. The background, too, representing the shift of business from the era of small independent firms to the era of colossal corporations, is no less skillfully suggested. Sam’s story is, indeed, the story of business during the past half-century and of the effects of commercial ambitions upon a somewhat ordinary but likable man of excellent intentions but limited vision.
As in all of Mr. Norris’s novels, the method is one of minute and. occasionally, unlovely detail, and one cannot fairly maintain that the method is a bad one. The objections to it concern selection and economy. A more important criticism is that the novel lacks emphasis and power, such as equally detailed and realistic novels by other members of the same school possess. The strongest scenes achieve at best an effect of unforced pathos — seldom any very searching comedy and never tragedy. Such scenes are those which picture Sam’s childhood home at Mendon, Massachusetts, and those that concern his attempt to set up a housekeeping establishment with Evelyn on an income of fifteen dollars a week. Certain characters, too, like Mr. Wright and Evelyn and Mr. Faber, remain clearly in the mind. And yet the final effect of the book upon a thoughtful reader is one of admiration for honest documentation and clever reporting. The reading holds one’s interest, but leaves one cold.
R. M. GAY