Therese Raquin (1867)

I decided to give this a try after I read somewhere that Kate Winslet said it was her favorite novel. Emile Zola is a key figure in literary naturalism, which, in the formulation of Wikipedia, "used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character." In many ways it's a literary analogue to Darwin's Origin of the Species, published in 1859. I have read a few of Zola's novels—the essential Germinal, which may be the place to start with his sizeable canon (even if it is #13 in his 20-novel Les Rougon-Macquart cycle), Nana (#9), and La Bete humaine (#17)—and liked them pretty well (overall, I prefer Theodore Dreiser when it comes to this strain, but that could be a kind of nativism on my part). Therese Raquin is essentially a first novel, however, and it seems to me so awkwardly done as to be very nearly unreadable. Certainly Zola was still learning the craft of fiction (one that he arguably never entirely got the hang of); he's plainly on the learning curve here. Most of it reads as summaries and explanations of events, which may be due at least in part to its initial serialization in a periodical. When I consider some of Winslet's more edgy roles, such as Ruth in Jane Campion's Holy Smoke!, I think I might have some idea how she came to name-check this story of mid-19th-century Parisian characters from a brutalized underclass, the pathetically tawdry affair between a laborer and the title character, a married woman, and eventually their conspiracy to murder her husband and the aftermath. The family ties and interrelations are suffocating, and Zola does a good job of marking out the extreme limitations of their lives. He's also good with scenes featuring the Paris morgue, which are vivid and strange. But most of it is slow and rambling, even for its relative brevity. The reception of the story in its time (Zola also later rewrote it as a stage play) turned it into the kind of scandalous controversy that can (and did) make a career. One contemporary critic denounced it as "putrid," and the immorality of the central story was widely condemned, which in turn enabled Zola to mount a defense that produced the kind of literary manifestoes for which the French are famous, with Zola making his case for what would eventually come to be known as literary naturalism. I think Zola is definitely worth looking into; in many ways he very nearly matches Balzac for his ability to imagine a huge and detailed social canvas filled with rich detail. But my sense is that you're better off starting with Germinal or some of the other titles in the massive Les Rougon-Macquart series (here's a recommended reading order for the series). There's time for this after you're finished with that.

In case it's not at the library.