I. Introduction: Returning to a Brutal Classic

It had been decades since I first read McTeague—a high school assignment long buried under the sediment of memory. I remembered the rough outline, the dentist on Polk Street, the gold coins, the desert. But I didn’t remember how cruel it all was. This time, I didn’t read it on paper; I listened. A dramatized audiobook with Stacy Keach, Edward Asner, Helen Hunt, and a full cast brought Frank Norris’s San Francisco to life with such intensity that I could almost smell the gaslights and hear the rumble of the early cable cars. It wasn’t just a story—it was an autopsy of humanity.

Author’s Note on Frank Norris and Historical Context

Before going further, it’s important to say what every honest reader eventually confronts with McTeague: Frank Norris’s worldview is deeply problematic by modern standards. His depictions of race and ethnicity—particularly of Jewish and Black characters—reflect the casual cruelty and pseudoscientific prejudices of his era. He wrote within a social Darwinist framework that saw hierarchy and brutality as natural law, a view that dehumanized as much as it described.

To acknowledge this is not to erase him, nor to excuse him, but to read him truthfully. The temptation today is to sit in judgment of the past with the full moral vocabulary of the present—a form of chronological arrogance that blinds as much as it corrects. Yet ignoring the harm in his portrayals would be its own kind of dishonesty.

It’s a narrow path: to recognize the historical context without surrendering moral clarity. Norris was a man of his age; that age was steeped in scientific racism. His writing, like his worldview, shows the limits of human wisdom without grace. Perhaps that, too, is part of the lesson: a culture that sees man as beast will inevitably treat him like one.

Frank Norris wrote McTeague at the turn of the twentieth century, when optimism about progress and science ran high. Yet his vision is profoundly cynical—a world where love curdles into possession, friendship rots into envy, and civilization is little more than a thin veneer over animal hunger. If a fairy tale promises that love conquers all, McTeague insists that greed does. Norris gives us a mirror without mercy, and what we see staring back is not a monster but ourselves.

And yet, for all its brutality, McTeague reveals something deeply consistent with the Christian worldview. It exposes the depravity of the human condition—the same fallen nature Scripture describes with painful precision. There’s no redemption here, no hero to root for, no happy ending. The story is a lament, not a gospel. But that lament is what makes it honest. Christianity doesn’t deny this darkness; it names it. And unlike Norris’s naturalism, it doesn’t leave us there. The Christian story offers not escape but cure—a promise that justice will come, that one day there will be “no more tears, no more fears.”

In the meantime, we read stories like McTeague to remember what happens when man is left to himself—when the light of grace is withdrawn and human instinct is all that remains. It is not a pleasant reminder, but a necessary one.

“McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

Even in that opening description, you can feel the moral weight—man as creature, without a creator; bound by appetite, not elevated by love. In Norris’s world, there is no grace to lift him, no divine hand to restrain the descent. Civilization polishes the surface, but underneath lies the same feral heart, waiting for its chance to bite.

II. The Author: Frank Norris and the Birth of American Naturalism

Frank Norris (1870–1902) stood at the dawn of modern American realism, but he was no romantic. Like many thinkers of his age, he believed man was a product of heredity, environment, and chance—not a soul endowed with purpose, but an animal caught in the indifferent gears of nature. His philosophy, shaped by the rising tide of Darwinism and Social Darwinist thought, treated the human being as a biological mechanism: driven by instinct, bound by circumstance, and ultimately powerless to transcend either.

In McTeague and later works like The Octopus and The Pit, Norris sought to portray life as it “really is”—raw, deterministic, and cruelly logical. He and his European counterpart Émile Zola believed that human behavior could be studied like chemistry: apply pressure, alter conditions, and the result is predictable. Sin, to them, was not rebellion against divine order but a misfiring of primitive instinct.

In that vision, there is no divine playwright—only a script written by environment and evolution, and man merely acts out his lines. It’s a world of determinism, where choice is an illusion and freedom a comforting myth. Yet that is where the fault line between naturalism and Christianity becomes most striking.

Where Norris sees man as the product of blind forces, Christianity sees him as the image of a Designer—fallen, yes, but not forsaken. Where naturalism says “you are what your genes and environment make you,” Scripture says “you are what grace can remake you.”

Chance, in the Christian story, never has the final word.

Design implies intention. Intention implies meaning. And meaning implies accountability—something Norris’s characters never discover until it’s too late.

Norris’s McTeague offers a haunting case study in what happens when freedom is stripped of design. The characters act out their compulsions like animals in a laboratory, unable to rise above appetite because they cannot imagine there is anything higher to reach for. Without design, there can be no true freedom—only reaction. And without a Creator, there can be no moral compass, only the slow orbit of instinct and decay.

“It was curious to note the effect of the alcohol upon the dentist. It did not make him drunk, it made him vicious.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

In one line, Norris captures his entire philosophy. There is no redemption, only regression. The veneer of civility dissolves, revealing what he believed man had always been: a beast with a thin coat of manners.

And yet, even as Norris paints a godless universe, he cannot escape its moral gravity. His story still aches for justice, still cries out for order in the chaos he claims to believe in. That longing—for meaning, for judgment—is itself a testament to the divine image buried beneath his fatalism.

It’s as if the author who denied design could not help but write a world that suffers for the lack of it.

III. The Setting: A Time Capsule of 1890s San Francisco

If the characters in McTeague are bound by appetite, their stage is Polk Street, the small but relentless world that shapes them. Norris’s San Francisco is more than backdrop—it is a living organism, breeding its people as surely as heredity shapes flesh. In his naturalism, environment is fate. A man does not rise above his street; he decays within it, like an abscessed tooth.

Norris lived there himself, and his descriptions ring with the intimacy of witness. The book captures the city in that liminal moment before the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906—horse-drawn buggies jostling against the first electric streetlamps, shop signs glowing under the damp Pacific fog. Listening to the dramatized audiobook, I could almost hear the clang of the early cable cars and smell the coal smoke drifting from tenement chimneys. This isn’t nostalgia; it’s anthropology. Polk Street is a petri dish where human nature ferments.

Researching after listening, I discovered that a cross street on Polk now bears Norris’s name. The irony struck me—his fiction immortalized the place that, in his worldview, doomed its inhabitants. To him, the street is both cradle and coffin.

“McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

That heaviness seems to rest not only on the man but on the entire city—a moral gravity pressing down from every brick and storefront. Norris’s San Francisco, like Zola’s Paris, is deterministic; every soul is a product of its surroundings, every action a reaction to pressure.

But where Norris saw environment as destiny, the Christian worldview sees place as providence. The streets where we live are not cosmic traps; they are contexts for choice. Geography shapes us, yes, but it does not imprison us. Providence allows that even in the most corrupt corner of Polk Street—or Wall Street, or any street—a person can still choose righteousness over ruin.

Norris’s city knows no such freedom. His San Francisco hums with commerce, lust, and greed, but no grace. It is a machine that grinds without purpose. Christianity, by contrast, insists that every place, however small or sordid, can become holy ground if God is present there.

“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence?” — Psalm 139:7

In McTeague, the answer would be “nowhere”—not because God is everywhere, but because He is absent. In the Christian story, the same word becomes hope: nowhere we go is beyond redemption.

Norris preserved Polk Street as a historical snapshot; faith transforms every street into a potential resurrection site.

Side note: I’d like to visit Polk Street someday to see how much remains of what Norris described. Probably not much—after the earthquake, most of that world vanished. But he painted it so vividly that I feel as though I’ve already walked those cobblestones myself, stepping straight into a literary holodeck built from his words.

IV. The Anatomy of Greed: Character and Corruption

Greed in McTeague is not a vice—it’s a gravity. Every character is drawn toward it, orbiting closer until they burn. What Norris gives us is not one story of greed but a taxonomy of it, dissected like specimens under glass. Each person in the novel reflects a facet of the same disease: appetite without restraint, desire without grace.

At the center stands McTeague, the lumbering, unlicensed dentist. He is less a villain than an empty vessel—strength without wisdom, instinct without conscience. Norris describes him bluntly:

“McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

That heaviness is more than physical. It is moral inertia. McTeague does not choose evil so much as slide into it, carried by his own appetites. Once his capacity for tenderness curdles into possessiveness, every action that follows is inevitable. He is the natural man, unredeemed and unrestrained—a body animated by hunger.

His wife Trina represents greed’s other face: obsession.

“She loved her money with an intensity that she could hardly express… ‘Ah, the dear money, the dear money,’ she would whisper. ‘I love you so! All mine, every penny of it.’” — Frank Norris, McTeague

Trina’s love of gold is a grotesque parody of worship. Her hoard becomes a shrine where she kneels alone, whispering her devotion to coins instead of God. Norris’s naturalism treats this not as sin but as instinct—one more symptom of heredity and chance. Yet even he cannot disguise the spiritual undertones. Her obsession feels like idolatry because it is. She clings to her money as if it might redeem her, but gold has no mercy, only weight.

Then there is Marcus, McTeague’s friend turned rival. His envy is dressed in righteousness. He rationalizes his bitterness, claiming moral injury when what he truly feels is resentment. His greed is social, not financial—the lust for status, recognition, power. Norris implies that this, too, is natural selection in motion: the stronger devouring the weaker, or at least trying to. In the end, both men are consumed.

“It was curious to note the effect of the alcohol upon the dentist. It did not make him drunk, it made him vicious.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

Alcohol, for Norris, functions almost sacramentally—a dark communion. It strips away pretense and reveals what is already true: McTeague is not civilized; he is merely sober. When he finally kills Trina, it is less an act of choice than of revelation. Violence is what lies beneath the surface of all his impulses.

Norris believed that greed and cruelty were the inevitable products of human nature—social evolution without moral evolution. But from a Christian lens, what he calls “inevitable” is simply sin without salvation. His world lacks grace, and so it knows only gravity. The characters fall not because they are designed to, but because there is no hand to lift them.

In contrast, Christianity affirms that free will can resist corruption—not by strength of instinct but by transformation of the heart. Greed is not destiny; it is diagnosis. And grace, unlike nature, offers cure. Without that cure, every virtue becomes distorted: love becomes lust, prudence becomes miserliness, friendship becomes envy. Norris’s world is the world without grace, and he records its symptoms with brutal accuracy.

“It belonged to the changeless order of things—the man desiring the woman only for what she withholds; the woman worshipping the man for that which she yields up to him.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

Even desire is corrupted. What should be mutual becomes transactional. The man takes, the woman bargains, and love becomes a form of leverage. It’s a cynical vision, and yet it reveals a truth that aligns with the Christian account of the Fall: apart from divine love, every human relationship becomes a contest of wills. The image of God gives way to the image of need.

In McTeague, there are no innocents—only degrees of decay. The result is a moral ecosystem where greed feeds on love, and the soul rots from the inside out, like that abscessed tooth on Polk Street.

Side note: Listening to the dramatized version, I could almost feel the weight of their words—the desperation, the breathing, the growing madness. It reminded me of how greed rarely announces itself as evil. It begins in whispers, in reasons that sound respectable. Only later does it reveal its true nature: hunger disguised as need.

V. Desire and the Animal Within

If greed is the gravity that pulls Norris’s characters downward, desire is the flame that blinds them on the way down. In McTeague, love is never redemptive; it is appetite seeking satisfaction. Norris portrays the union of man and woman not as covenant but as collision—two forces of nature meeting under pressure.

“It belonged to the changeless order of things—the man desiring the woman only for what she withholds; the woman worshipping the man for that which she yields up to him.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

In one sentence he reduces human intimacy to the law of exchange: lust and leverage, hunger and submission. There is no affection here, only biological ritual dressed in the clothing of romance. Norris’s lovers do not give themselves; they consume each other. What begins as attraction curdles into domination, and tenderness dies in the shadow of possession.

This is the inevitable logic of a world without transcendence. If there is no Creator, then love can be nothing more than chemistry; the sacred collapses into the sensual. Norris’s naturalism leaves no room for mystery, no higher law to govern desire. The body wants, the will obeys, and conscience becomes an evolutionary inconvenience.

But the biblical understanding of love—the agape Christ modeled—is the opposite of this downward pull. It is not hunger but sacrifice.

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” — John 15:13

True love is not the pursuit of what we lack but the pouring out of what we have. It is antithetical to greed, because greed clutches while love releases. It is antithetical to desire-as-possession, because it seeks the good of the other even at the cost of self. Love, in its truest sense, is not an instinct to be managed but a grace to be chosen.

That is why Norris’s world feels so suffocating: his characters crave what only grace can give, but they try to earn it through appetite. Trina hoards, McTeague grasps, Marcus resents—and all of them end up impoverished. In a universe ruled by chance and instinct, love inevitably decays into control.

From a Christian lens, their tragedy is not that they desired too much, but that they desired too little—content with the imitation when the original was within reach. The self-sacrificial love of Scripture lifts the human heart out of the closed system of instinct and opens it toward eternity. Without it, every embrace becomes an act of consumption, every relationship a slow act of cannibalism of the soul.

Norris saw only the animal within. The gospel reveals the image of God within—a being capable of loving not for gain but for grace. That kind of love is not natural; it is supernatural. And that is precisely why it saves.

VI. The Two Natures of Man: Evolution or Fall

Frank Norris was a man of his century, caught between the promises of science and the shadow of sin. Like many naturalists, he tried to explain human behavior through evolution—our instincts as relics of an earlier stage, our morality as a thin new layer not yet stable. Civilization, in his view, is the scaffolding around the unfinished animal.

He captures that conflict vividly in one of the novel’s most haunting lines:

“Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

In a single image, Norris describes the divided self—the tension between what man aspires to be and what his blood remembers. The “foul stream” is heredity, the ancient animal nature that seeps upward no matter how carefully we build over it. For Norris, man is not fallen from perfection but still climbing out of the mire, one evolutionary rung at a time. And yet, by his own logic, he never really climbs. His characters are trapped between instinct and intellect, half-awake in a dream of progress that never comes.

That is where the Christian worldview stands in sharp relief. Christianity does not see man as an unfinished project of nature but as a broken masterpiece of creation. We are not evolving from beasts; we are devolving from glory. The primal hunger Norris describes is not a leftover from prehistory—it is the echo of a spiritual catastrophe. The Bible calls it the Fall.

Where Norris’s naturalism says, “Man cannot rise,” Christianity says, “Man once stood, and can stand again.” The difference is everything.

Norris’s divided man fights a losing battle because he fights it alone. His “higher” nature is not truly higher—it’s just his animal will pretending at morality. He knows what it is to feel guilt but not what it means to be forgiven. His universe has no Redeemer, only recessive genes.

“What was this perverse, vicious thing that lived within him, knitted to his flesh? Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil… The evil of an entire race flowed in his veins.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

In this passage, Norris comes astonishingly close to theology. He names what Scripture names—the persistence of evil within—but without the remedy. His diagnosis is right, his prognosis terminal. He senses the corruption of the human heart but denies the possibility of new birth.

The Christian view agrees that man is divided, but not doomed. The same tension that Norris portrays in despair, faith reframes in hope:

“For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” — Romans 7:15

Paul’s lament is McTeague’s in spiritual form, but where Paul cries out, “Who will rescue me?” he receives an answer: Christ Jesus our Lord.

Norris never reaches that verse. His world stops at Romans 7 and never finds Romans 8. His characters live and die in the first half of the story of man—aware of the struggle, ignorant of the salvation.

In the end, Norris’s McTeague is a dark mirror of Genesis. His man is shaped from dust, but no divine breath animates him. And when the dust finally claims him back, there is no promise of resurrection—only the silence of the desert.

VII. The Desert Finale: The Death Valley of the Soul

The final act of McTeague unfolds not in the city but in the desert—a place stripped of all pretense, where only truth remains. Here, Norris brings his naturalistic vision to its logical end: man, alone with his sin, facing the void.

After murdering Trina for her hoarded gold, McTeague flees San Francisco with the last of his stolen money, heading east across the barren expanse toward Death Valley—a name that feels less geographic than prophetic. His friend-turned-enemy Marcus pursues him, driven by greed disguised as justice. The two men, bound by envy and betrayal, meet in a violent struggle under the brutal desert sun. When it ends, Marcus is dead, and McTeague is handcuffed to his corpse—trapped, exhausted, and doomed to die beside the man he once called brother.

It is one of the most haunting images in American literature: the sinner literally shackled to the consequence of his sin.

The desert becomes a mirror of the soul—a lifeless landscape where justice exists but mercy does not.

Norris writes with chilling detachment. There is no divine voice, no absolution, no moral reckoning beyond the physical. McTeague’s death is not punishment from God but the indifferent conclusion of natural law. Greed leads to decay; violence begets violence. It is the gospel of entropy.

“The desert stretched out gray and terrible under the burning sun… not a sound, not a breath of life.” — Frank Norris, McTeague

From a Christian perspective, this is judgment without a judge, consequence without redemption. The moral structure of the universe remains, but its Maker is absent. Norris can depict the wages of sin, but not the forgiveness of it.

The desert is the perfect symbol for spiritual desolation. Scripture often uses wilderness as a place of testing and revelation—Moses at Sinai, Jesus tempted in the desert. But those deserts always end in deliverance. McTeague’s does not. It is an eternal Lent without Easter.

This ending resonates strangely with another American tragedy: True Detective Season 2. When the cartel takes Semyon out to the desert and stab him for violating their deal. This reminded me of McTeague and I can see parallels.

• Ray Velcoro, like McTeague, tries to outrun his past, driven by guilt and greed, reaching for redemption in all the wrong ways.
• Both men die in isolation—McTeague in the desert, Velcoro in the forest—each consumed by the corruption they once believed they could master.
• Both leave behind messages that never reach their destination—McTeague’s body lost to the sands, Velcoro’s final voicemail erased before it’s heard.
• Both stories end the same way: with man alone in his self-made hell, unredeemed, unremembered. Their deaths are not acts of divine justice but confirmations of spiritual truth—life without grace is death long before dying.

From a Christian lens, Norris’s finale is the world as it would be if God never spoke again—a cosmos governed by cause and effect, but devoid of meaning. The desert judges but does not save.

And yet, paradoxically, the scene proves the very thing Norris denies. The ache for justice in his story—the sense that such evil ought to be answered—betrays the presence of a moral law deeper than biology. If the universe were truly indifferent, no reader would feel horror or pity. The desert would be just sand. But we do feel it. We recoil at McTeague’s fate because something in us knows this isn’t how the story is meant to end.

In that way, Norris’s conclusion becomes an unintentional apologetic: proof that man was made for redemption, not ruin. The Christian story begins where his ends—with grace stepping into the desert to carry us home.

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the rose.” — Isaiah 35:1

Norris’s world never blooms, but the promise remains. What he paints as final judgment is, through the lens of faith, only a pause before resurrection.

VIII. Reflections: The Mirror Still Holds

When I first read McTeague in high school, I saw it as a grim curiosity—a period piece about a brutal man in a bygone San Francisco. Revisiting it now, I realize it’s far more than that. Norris didn’t just write about one man’s downfall; he wrote a parable of humanity without grace. His world may be confined to Polk Street, but its moral topography stretches everywhere. We recognize it because it still exists—in boardrooms, in headlines, in our own hearts.

Norris’s cynicism feels prophetic today. He saw what happens when material progress outpaces moral progress, when science replaces soul, and when love becomes transaction. In his time, the great idol was gold; today it might be power, fame, or validation. The altars change, but the worship is the same. Humanity still kneels before the same false gods and wonders why it feels empty.

That is why McTeague still matters. It holds up a mirror to a culture that thinks it has evolved beyond sin. It reminds us that without God, progress only perfects our capacity for destruction.

Yet as a Christian, I can’t stop at the mirror. Norris exposes the disease, but only the gospel offers the cure. His world ends in Death Valley; ours can end in resurrection. Where he saw inevitability, Christ offers intervention. The greed that rotted McTeague from within is not fate—it’s the corruption that grace was made to cleanse.

“Behold, I am making all things new.” — Revelation 21:5

That promise changes how we read tragedy. Norris’s universe is governed by law but not love; Christianity binds both together. Justice will happen—every sin accounted for, every tear wiped away. But judgment is not the end; it is the prelude to renewal. The desert will bloom. The streets of Polk will one day be paved with gold, not hoarded by it.

We read books like McTeague not for pleasure but for perspective. They remind us of what the world becomes when man is left to himself—a world without hope, without grace, without light. But the very horror of that vision makes the gospel shine brighter. Where Norris ends with a corpse in the desert, Scripture ends with a city descending from heaven.

The mirror still holds, but now we know there’s a way beyond the reflection.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” — 1 Corinthians 13:12

Until that day, stories like McTeague keep us honest. They remind us that beneath our polish, we are still prone to decay—and that without love, even civilization becomes just another form of savagery. But they also remind us that grace is real, and that one day, the handcuffs of sin will break, and the wilderness will rejoice.

IX. Closing Thoughts

Listening to McTeague as a dramatized audiobook felt like stepping into another century. The voices—Stacy Keach’s grim resolve, Edward Asner’s gravel, Helen Hunt’s brittle tenderness—turned the novel’s words into living ghosts. I could almost see the flicker of gaslight on Polk Street, hear the creak of horse-drawn carriages, smell the salt off the Bay. For a few hours, I wasn’t just hearing a story; I was walking through a moral landscape that felt startlingly familiar.

That’s the unsettling thing about Norris’s world: though it belongs to 1890s San Francisco, it never really left us. We have smartphones instead of telegraphs, electric cars instead of cable cars, but the same greed hums beneath the surface. His characters live on in every scandal, every moral compromise, every soul that mistakes appetite for freedom.

And yet, despite its cynicism, McTeague left me strangely grateful. Norris saw the darkness clearly, and sometimes seeing the darkness is the first step toward seeking the light. Christianity doesn’t deny what he described—it affirms it, and then offers redemption. If Norris’s novel ends in the desert, Scripture ends in a garden restored.

That contrast is why I keep revisiting these old stories. They remind me what happens when love is replaced by desire, when grace gives way to greed, when man forgets his Creator and becomes his own experiment. But they also make me thankful for the greater story—the one where justice and mercy meet, and every valley, even Death Valley, is lifted up.

So yes, I still want to walk down Polk Street someday. I know it’s changed since Norris’s time—rebuilt after the quake, reshaped by the century—but I want to see it anyway. To stand where he once stood and remember that beneath every human city lies the same choice: greed or grace, decay or redemption.

And maybe, just maybe, to whisper a quiet prayer that what was once a symbol of ruin might one day become, in some small way, a sign of renewal.

“No more death, nor sorrow, nor crying; there shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” — Revelation 21:4

Excerpt

Frank Norris’s McTeague exposes a world stripped of grace—love reduced to appetite, progress to greed. Revisiting it through a vivid dramatization felt like walking Polk Street’s moral ruins. Norris saw only decay; faith sees redemption. The desert of his story still mirrors our own need for mercy.