Limitations

Just finished reading Emile Zola's Therese Raquin. Impressed with the brutal dreariness of the tale. Claustrophobic in the extreme, there isn't a single genuinely sympathetic or remotely likeable character in the novel, I suppose because there's no real depth to any of them, including the titular Therese. Zola keeps a magisterial distance from all his creations, as if viewing an experiment that has gone sadly awry.

Actually there isn't much in the way of real suspense, which is odd considering that this is the story of a murder. It's made very clear that Therese and Laurent will get away with the killing of her husband and the reader knows that they will be psychologically disabled and destroyed by the deed within pages of it taking place. And there's no real mystery about the characters. Their every feeling and response is spelled out for us.

So, given these limitations is this in any sense a good novel? It's precisely the limitations that make it work for me. I'd regard Therese Raquin as a brilliant horror story, but certainly not the work of realism that Zola pretends he's writing. The hapless Camille's ghost haunting the murderers is the best thing in it, followed by the sardonically observant cat, Francois.