Oil by Upton Sinclair

Sinclair is a writer with an agenda, and his cause is the promotion of socialism. This was somewhat apparent in his most well-known novel, The Jungle, but that book also included an interesting story and a most horrifying picture of the meat packing industry, which caught the attention of the public and actually led to legislative changes. Unfortunately, Oil's story line is less engaging and the abuses revealed of oil price-fixing and government corruption are less immediate (and less fixable, perhaps) than was the problem of unsanitary meat. The edition I read is a re-issue, because the movie There Will Be Blood used the novel as inspiration. (More about that later.)

The novel tells the story of Bunny Ross, the privileged heir to the fortune of a self-made independent oilman, following his life from the age of 9 or 10 until his mid-20's. Through his (somewhat contrived) life story, the reader meets wildcatting wheeler-dealers, corrupt politicians, self-involved rich college students, Hollywood starlets, a cynical evangelist, and various idealistic socialist and communist young people. The plot is episodic and seems to be tacked together so that Sinclair can air his views about various segments of America's capitalistic society and promote socialism as a solution to the country's problems.

This sort of didactic writing can be effective when the central characters are fully realized and sympathetic (as in The Grapes of Wrath), or when the plot is inventive or suspenseful (as in 1984) . Unfortunately, Oil lacks both these elements. Sinclair is a very capable writer, particularly in his descriptive passages, but in this book he seems clearly to be more concerned with persuading and airing grievances than with telling a story well.

The movie There Will Be Blood focuses on the father rather than on Bunny and follows the novel's plot only at the beginning, before totally departing to create a new, very different story-line. Despite the movie's somewhat vague focus, I would have to say I found it more interesting than the book.

I will not read this one again.