Moloch Or This Gentile World - Hardcover

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 Cock in 1988 by Miller biographer Mary V. Dearborn, Moloch is based on Miller's years at Western Union and his first marriage. Set in the rapidly changing New York City of the early 1920s, the novel has as its hero the rough-and-tumble Dion Moloch, a man filled with anger and despair. Stuck in a demeaning job and an acrimonious homelife, Moloch escapes to the streets, only to be assaulted by a land that he despises - the transforming Brooklyn and its ever-increasing ethnic sights, sounds, and smells. Moloch strikes out at everything that he hates, battling against a world that threatens to overwhelm and then 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 unflinchingly honest view of himself in a world created out of the writer's life.

Miller's lost first complete novel, which--along with the unfinished Crazy Cock (1991) that followed-- was unearthed in 1988. In her introduction, Mary V. Dearborn tells us: ``Moloch is intriguing as a piece of Miller juvenilia and as a first attempt at autobiographical fiction....But its prose is spotty and uneven, almost uniformly stilted and awkward, and the narrative voice is inconsistent and frequently obtrusive.'' The caveats made, this is still a pretty awful book by a wonderfully original writer finding his voice. Nobody in America in 1927 was writing even remotely like Miller does in Moloch, a novel that refuses to cut back on its vaulting ambition or to sweeten its sights with kindnesses to anyone. He writes in the third person about his days as a personnel manager for Western Union, called here The Great American Telegraph Company, and in Tropic of Capricorn The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. These office scenes are a run-through for the full frenetically unbuttoned experience in Capricorn, but their humor is mildly sardonic and laced with ethnic slurs appropriate to the characters. The sex here, mild by Miller's later standards, was unquestionably outspoken for its day when no man ever touched a woman's breast in fiction. Meanwhile, despite its gargantuan flaws and thick prose, something striking arises on every page, gleaming like turquoise shards in an empty lot. The story, such as it is, more or less focuses on Dion Moloch's job, his associates, and his playing free and loose while wife Blanche and daughter Edda wait at home. Then Moloch comes to terms with Blanche, after she leaves him. A period piece, often boring, filled with likable grotesques and gritty street-sights in Manhattan and Brooklyn. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.