Germinal
Zola descended into the French coal mines in 1885 and produced a novel that made the conditions of industrial capitalism visible to the bourgeoisie for the first time. The mass scenes (the strike, the mine collapse) are unprecedented in European fiction. Still taught and still radical. The great novel of labor and class struggle.
Etienne is a position rather than a person, and readers say so: "the main characters felt very flat," mouthpieces for an argument while the genuinely interesting figures around them get fragments. Zola "writes more like a journalist or a documentarian than a novelist," thorough and exact and holding you at arm's length, which is why one reader concludes it "doesn't come within a country mile of Madame Bovary." The mine-as-devouring-beast image repeats until it goes mechanical, and readers start wishing for "the mine without the analogy of a gorging beast." There is no relief anywhere across five hundred pages, and the sexual material, some involving children, strikes readers as gratuitous rather than necessary.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
