Moloch: Or, This Gentile World

by Henry Miller

Overview

Uncovered along with Crazy Cock in 1988 by Miller biographer Mary V. Dearborn, Moloch emerged from the misery of Miller's years at Western Union and from the squalor of his first marriage. Set in the rapidly changing New York City of the early twenties, its hero is the rough-and-tumble Dion Moloch, a man filled with anger and despair. Trapped in a demeaning job, oppressed by an acrimonious home life, Moloch escapes to the streets only to be assaulted by a world he despises even more — a Brooklyn transformed into a shrill medley of ethnic sights, sounds, and smells. The antagonized Moloch strikes out blindly at everything he hates, battling against a world whose hostility threatens to overwhelm and destroy him.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555846930
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/01/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Henry Valentine Miller (1891-1980) was an American author known for breaking existing literary forms and most famous for books like Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, both of which were once banned in the United States. The semi–autobiographical novels delved into themes of sexuality and were considered controversial. Born in New York City and raised in Brooklyn, Miller also lived in Paris, Berlin, the South of France, Greece, as well as Beverly Glen, Big Sur, and Pacific Palisades, California. His other popular books include Black Spring, The Colossus of Maroussi, Nexus, Plexus and Sexus. Henry Miller also wrote literary criticism, travel memoirs, was a successful painter and appeared as himself in several films.

Editorial Reviews

Dion Moloch, the hero of Miller's first extant, heretofore unpublished novel (written in 1927 and long thought to be the work of his wife June), is an anti-Semitic boor and vain intellectual snob who defends his wife-beating and crudely mocks a friend's death. A stand-in for the aspiring novelist himself, Moloch, who works for a New York telegraph company (modeled on Western Union, where Miller himself once worked) embodies the author's twisted Nietzschean image of himself as ``an iconoclast who destroyed from a sheer superabundance of health and strength.'' As Miller biographer Dearborn notes in her introduction, Moloch's dominant theme is its protagonist's poisonous, obsessive hatred of Jews, which makes long stretches of this work offensive. Peppered with repellent slurs against women, gays, blacks and other ethnic groups, the novel nevertheless provides tantalizing flashes of Miller's mature, quasi-surreal, apocalyptic style and offers flavorful glimpses of 1920s Manhattan, Brooklyn's mean streets and Jazz Age Harlem. Moloch's relationship with his wife, Blanche (modeled on Miller's first wife), is one long, bitter quarrel, in which the two simmer with mutual resentment. The chief interest in this half-baked, awkwardly written self-portrait lies in watching Miller feel his way into the autobiographical adventure narrative, a mode he would bring to fruition in Tropic of Capricorn. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Like Crazy Cock ( LJ 9/15/91), Moloch , Miller's earliest novel, lay lost for most of its author's life. It draws on an even earlier series of sketches, ``Clipped Wings,'' and in its turn provided grist for Tropic of Capricorn ( LJ 9/1/62). Miller's wife, June, passed the novel off as her own--with Miller's connivance--in a scheme to milk a rich ``friend'' who fancied himself a patron of the arts. The novelist's Bowery setting allows Miller to caricature a parade of down-and-outers--an approach he would later raise to an art. But as Miller biographer Mary V. Dearborn ( ``The Happiest Man Alive'': A Biography of Henry Miller , LJ 4/15/91) declares in her introduction, Moloch ``leaves much to be desired.'' Miller's style here is literary in the worst sense, and his anti-Semitism is pronounced. For fans only.-- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.

Library Journal