Zola, Emile. Germinal (1885). New York: Signet Classics, 1981.

If I were a character in this novel I'd never last. I'd be dead by Part Three, and I don't think the first death happens until Part Five.

Everyone knows mining is hard work. Everyone knows danger happens. In the summer of 2002 I was drinking with my pal S. at Zythos Bar in Pittsburgh's South Side when nine miners were pulled out from the depths of the coal-clogged earth where for days we'd been assuming they'd been killed. So I thought I knew what I was getting myself into, but Zola is such a good and careful writer that I really had no idea of the amount of heat and wetness and claustrophobic spaces in the bottom of mines that workers slogged through.

There's a scene in which a pre-pubescent girl who's already been working in the mines for years is so hot that she has to strip down to her "shift" which is like old-school 1800's underwear, and this shift itself gets so damp and sticky with the inky mud of the mineshaft that it clings to her body like an extra skin and in order to continue working has to take this off too, so that she's crawling around naked with only a lantern helmet in a very tight space with half-a-dozen other naked men, all of them covered in black, black muck.

As far as difficult scenes to read through, this is nothing compared to the one where a mob of angry women storm the freshly killed corpse of a storekeeper and rip his genitals off with their hands.

Theme Assignment
Explain why such things make a book good.
This book is good not because it gives us such physical detail of such rough, animalistic activities. This book is good because such detail keeps a reader deep in the world of the novel. I write this even if to admire a book for doing such a thing—i.e. keeping a reader dreaming Gardner's fictional dream—is so completely uncool these days.