Tropic of Cancer is without a doubt one of the weirdest books I've ever read. Henry Miller's "autobiographical novel" was written in 1934, and set in contemporary Paris. Though published in France in that year, the book was banned in the US. It was published in Miller's native land for the first time only in 1961, after the Supreme Court ruled that the work had artistic merit and could not be censored. The work was still labeled "obscene" by Citizens for Decent Literature.

There really isn't much of a plot in Tropic of Cancer as such things go, nor does Miller trouble himself to develop any great themes. The viewpoint is entirely first-person, the open ended story being narrated by an American writer living a thoroughly dissolute, down-and-out life in Paris. The tone of the passages veers from hallucinatory stream-of-dream head-trips to profane elegies of...something or other, from philosophical commentary about the nature of art and the task of the artist and to rambling paeans to the squalid Parisian underbelly.

Was Miller raunchy for the sake of getting in society's face? Sure he was. And his blatant rejection of the work ethic in favor of begging, squatting and flopping is really another one of Miller's Bronx cheers for the middle class. But he was also a skilled wordsmith, and anyone who writes off Tropic of Cancer as nothing but low-grade smut deserving of censorship has some sort of conservative agenda to push.

Miller obviously intends to shock his readers when he refers invariably to women as c*nts (unless they're whores, in which case he refers to them as "whores"), and to blacks as n*ggers, and to Chinese as "little yellow men." I'm not so much offended as I am nonplussed. It would be one thing, I suppose, to use these words to make a point, but Miller doesn't seem to have any point to make. In fact the "novel" rambles on pretty aimlessly as far as I can tell.

Tropic of Cancer seems to me a thoroughly joyless creature. Although Miller dwells at length on the daily hunger and grinding poverty of his unnamed narrator, whenever this character manages to cadge a free meal in the book, food is devoid of pleasure. And it's not that food is merely nourishment and thus beneath description; food in Tropic of Cancer is disgusting and repulsive. Soups taste like "a dirty dishrag." Suppers are said to resemble the large toe of a cadaver. Rancid "greasecakes" are served up at the home of one benefactor, whose meals Miller likens to vomit.

I think the book would have had more resonance for me if Miller had evinced even the slightest enjoyment of his extremely avant garde grunge lifestyle. But if there is any enjoyment in the novel, it's only Miller's perverse pleasure in making his reader's stomach turn. Miller seems to revel in describing tapeworms carefully laid on kitchen tables, bedbug bites, halitosis and "evacuation" difficulties.

Sex is equally joyless in Miller's book. All the many sex acts in the book are either paid arrangements with prostitutes or illicit interludes with married women who haven't "had a lay in six months." There's never any intimacy in the act, no beauty, and certainly no love. Venereal diseases are much discussed. And then there's the monolog of the narrator's acquaintance who likens female genitalia to a "dead clam." Again I have to wonder what Miller's point was in shoving so much unpleasantness in his reader's face. If there's any message here, it's that life is misery, but marginally more tolerable in liberal Paris. I can only see the work as highly nihilistic and self-indulgent, and not a very clever example of either.

The problem with this analysis thus far is that it ignores a number of lucid and extremely eloquent passages embedded in the mire of the rest of the book. Great beauty flowed from Miller's pen at times. One suspects those were the few times when he was sober and decently fed, but still there is no denying that he could turn a marvelous phrase when the stars were correctly aligned. And he could capture the fleeting moments of crystalline inward clarity as few other writers can. There are some clever but crude humorous passages that are worth reading if you're broadminded enough. Also, he had the guts to put his unfiltered thoughts, observations and all the gritty details of his daily life on the page, knowing what obloquy it would win him. Yet in the end, he lets the whole ungainly mess flop around, unchecked, like a gasping fish on a dinner table. And not so much as a decent fish course comes of it.

I was frankly bewildered to read the ringing praises heaped on this work by the likes of George Orwell, who said, "I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read Tropic of Cancer" and Samuel Beckett, who declared it "a momentous event in the history of modern writing." Were their hosannas just mealy-mouthed tributes to a long censored fellow author, or am I simply not seeing what they saw in this book?

I couldn't help but suspect that Miller was really attempting to pull a fast one on the stuck-up literary crowd. A great many passages in the book read like the inane scribblings of a gifted writer who just couldn't be arsed to put much effort into things, let alone edit his work. Perhaps Miller wanted to put something provocative, unpolished and deliberately unworthy out there, just to see who would take the bait. In a way, you could say that he got away with it, except for the fact that the book was solidly censored for so many years in the US.

So where's my opinion on this book? I don't know. It's such a putrid little pot of a "novel" that I think it's a bit silly to try to pin it down with a sliding scale of one to five stars. This is one of those cases in which I could go with anything from two to four stars. It certainly is no masterpiece in my view, but neither is it total rubbish. I suppose, in the end, that I'm just not impressed by people who rebel against whatever perceived standards there are simply for the sake of rebelling. Even Miller, who rebelled pretty early in the game, appears to be rebelling to conform. I'm not saying it's always better to shut up and toe the line. But if you're going to take the time to burden the world with a book epitomizing your disdain for so many societal conventions, then I'd prefer it if you took the trouble to develop some alternative, and presumably superior, themes to toss into the marketplace of ideas. Needless to say, Miller doesn't. In fact, he doesn't even try.

Obviously, I'm not recommending this book for prudes. Feminists who haven't embraced the word c*nt as part of their own empowerment had better have a healthy sense of proportion, or avoid the book altogether. Unless of course, they happen to be looking for their next source of indignation and outrage. Likewise, conservatives (and probably moderates as well) will want to keep this title away from little Johnnie and Susie. (And yes, for those of you keeping score at home, I have now specifically warned liberals, moderates and conservatives away from this book.) Those with literary pretensions will lap it up of course, and anyone with an interest in 20th century English lit is pretty much obliged to read it. Those with a particular attachment to Paris might also find it an interesting read. All others can read this at their own risk.



Recommended: No