Vandover and the Brute

By Frank Norris

Book Overview

Posthumously published in 1914, Vandover and the Brute is probably Frank Norris's first complete novel, much of it written when he was a student at Harvard in 1894-1895. The subject matter made it unacceptable to turn-of-the-century taste, and when the book finally did appear one reviewer declared that "it ought to have been issued for private circulation only" (Bookman). The setting of the story is San Francisco in the 1890s. Vandover, fresh out of college and the son of a wealthy owner of slum properties, has dreams of being an artist but lacks the discipline to fulfill them. His seduction of a young woman results in her suicide and the death of his own father. Cheated by false friends of part of his patrimony, Vandover gambles away the rest. Finally, as Warren French writes in Frank Norris, "he becomes a bum reduced to cleaning the offal from the slum houses he once owned. His degeneration has also been marked by attacks of lycanthropy, during which he pads around on all fours, naked, howling like a wolf."

Although present-day critics would agree with one of the few favorable early judgments--that "it is a first novel of which any writer might be proud" (Boston Transcript)--Vandover and the Brute has yet to be established in its proper place in American fiction. Warren French's introduction points out that while the novel is usually considered as an early, unrevised example of American naturalism, it needs to be seen now as a principal example of a "decadent" literature that flourished briefly in the United States in the 1890s as the influence of the genteel tradition was collapsing. It presents the portrait of an artistic young man comparable to the portrait of a young matron in Kate Chopin's now much discussed novel The Awakening.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803283504
• ISBN13: 9780803283503
• Release Date: August 1978
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

An early example of American realism

Recalling Crane's "Maggie" in its sexual candor and several of Dreiser's novels in its brutal portrayal of the decline of its protagonist, "Vandover and the Brute" can be read as the American realist version of Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." (The lead character is, not coincidentally, reading Stevenson early in the novel.) Written in 1895, when Norris was 25, but not published until 1914, after Norris's death, it is an important if uneven precursor to the naturalist tradition in American literature.Young Vandover, a Harvard-educated man-about-town whose chief traits are a lack of ambition and a sense of entitlement, is a San Francisco native who wastes every advantage his privileged life presents to him. Yielding to his inner "brute," Vandover gradually descends the rungs of civilized life, losing first his status in "proper" society and then all his wealth and what remains of his integrity. He suffers from the devastation of self-inflicted scandals, the trauma of a shipwreck during exile, and the ravages of syphilis. Yet Norris doesn't direct his barbs solely at indolent, amoral youth like Vandover; just as reprehensible is the ambitious, double-crossing Charles Geary, one of Vandover's friends, who aims "to make his pile in this town and make his way, too." (An interesting aside: unlike most realist fiction, the novel's last sentence ends with a glimmer of hope and a piece of bread--very much like McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City.")Although this novel is no longer available on its own in any edition, interested readers will find it included in The Library of America's omnibus collection of Frank Norris's works.