It’s a good piece of art, but a terrible book. Zola is a master at conveying information and painting a scene. Yet, the book is muddled, inappropriately French, and very, very boring. In short, two and a half stars.
In long, Zola wrote the Les Rougon-Macquart series to depict and criticize the Second French Empire. In the second book (I think), he tries to do three things.
Portray the ruling class of France while exposing their excess and indulgence.
Reveal the rampant financial speculation of said class, which fueled the architectural changes in Paris.
Examine why the old nobility handed over their power to this new class, through the three main characters: Saccard, Maxime and Renée.
The problem is that although Zola succeeds in what he set out to do, he never engages the reader. I never cared about the characters. Except in flashes (and in maybe the last 10 pages of the book), Zola writes with no hooks or solid pacing.
Zola goes on for pages. He writes about excessive clothes and opulent homes. He writes about the absurd financial schemes of the French bourgeoisie. He goes to great lengths to explain how they manipulate markets. They set up shams. They incriminate key government agents. They indebted national banks to them so that they can never fail. The old nobility, living stale, cold lives, sell their property to these men. They're attracted to their dynamism. So, the nobility fuel their schemes to gain access. And although the reader comes away from the text informed about what was going on and disgusted by these pigs in blankets of human skin, there’s little incentive to care.
To be fair, it’s not my money, not my country, not my time. I have a degree of separation not available to the intended audience. But I question why a reader should care. (At the time, readers clearly did care; the publication of the story was stopped in 1872 for immorality.) But what would be compelling now? There is no character to root for. I want to root for Renée; a poor woman being taken advantage of. However, she grooms her stepson (offensively French behaviour) and is as shallow and materialistic as any other character. I waited for these men to suffer. But the suffering never comes.
Maybe the incestuous affair was a draw in the past. But now, any 13-year-old can watch a pornstar pretend to be their stepmother. Maybe the detailed descriptions of beautiful clothes meant something to 1800s Parisians. But now LED lights blast those into our eyes in 4K. Apparently, the characters are loosely based on public figures of the time (and I have some thoughts on who those might be). But now, those men and women are just names in a book.
Zola’s a good author. He does his job. But the sensationalist draw that got the book banned is gone. There’s not much left for the modern reader. He can describe rich people having illicit affairs in velvet rooms, but I can watch Two Girls One Cup.