Volume 43, Number 5 · March 21, 1996
Between Animal and Angel
By John Weightman
Zola: A Life
by Frederick Brown
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 888 pp., $37.50
This eight-hundred-page volume must be the most monumental account of Zola that has so far appeared in either French or English. It is some five hundred pages longer than an earlier notable English study—Emile Zola by F.W.J. Hemmings (second edition, 1966). The basic story told in both volumes can be summarized in a few sentences. Zola, Parisian-born but brought up in Aix-en-Provence, came back to Paris at eighteen with the typical young Frenchman's ambition to 'conquer' the capital. The fatherless orphan, through a tremendous exercise of willpower combined with a remarkable flair for publicity, became a best-selling author and the satirical chronicler of Second Empire France. He was probably the first French author to earn a great deal of money from his books, and the first to set himself up as a landed gentleman.
Review, 4912 words
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