Moloch
Or, This Gentile World
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this, his first extant novel, Henry Miller made his earliest full-fledged attempt at autobiographical fiction, a literary form he was later to perfect in Paris.
Uncovered along with Crazy C**k in 1988 by Miller biographer Mary V. Dearborn, Moloch emerged from the misery of Miller’s years at Western Union and from the squalor of his first marriage. Set in the rapidly changing New York City of the early twenties, its hero is the rough-and-tumble Dion Moloch, a man filled with anger and despair. Trapped in a demeaning job, oppressed by an acrimonious homelife, Moloch escapes to the streets only to be assaulted by a world he despises even more—a Brooklyn transformed into a shrill medley of ethnic sights, sounds, and smells. The antagonized Moloch strikes out blindly at everything he hates, battling against a world whose hostility threatens to overwhelm and destroy him.
Brutal and shocking, sometimes awkward and rambling, Moloch displays Miller’s first steps toward the motif that he was to make his hallmark: the scathingly direct hero striving for an unflinching view of himself in a world created out of the writer’s life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dion Moloch, the hero of Miller's first extant, heretofore unpublished novel (written in 1927 and long thought to be the work of his wife June), is an anti-Semitic boor and vain intellectual snob who defends his wife-beating and crudely mocks a friend's death. A stand-in for the aspiring novelist himself, Moloch, who works for a New York telegraph company (modeled on Western Union, where Miller himself once worked) embodies the author's twisted Nietzschean image of himself as ``an iconoclast who destroyed from a sheer superabundance of health and strength.'' As Miller biographer Dearborn notes in her introduction, Moloch's dominant theme is its protagonist's poisonous, obsessive hatred of Jews, which makes long stretches of this work offensive. Peppered with repellent slurs against women, gays, blacks and other ethnic groups, the novel nevertheless provides tantalizing flashes of Miller's mature, quasi-surreal, apocalyptic style and offers flavorful glimpses of 1920s Manhattan, Brooklyn's mean streets and Jazz Age Harlem. Moloch's relationship with his wife, Blanche (modeled on Miller's first wife), is one long, bitter quarrel, in which the two simmer with mutual resentment. The chief interest in this half-baked, awkwardly written self-portrait lies in watching Miller feel his way into the autobiographical adventure narrative, a mode he would bring to fruition in Tropic of Capricorn.
