Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Oil! was published in 1926. Upton Sinclair ran for Congress twice for the Socialist Party, losing both times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for The Dragon's Teeth.

Allison: 

As I began reading Oil! I realized immediately that I had read it before. The book opens with a rollicking chapter, The Ride, introducing Dad and Bunny, the patriarch and heir of the epic to which we are about to become interminably festooned. It is an epic, this novel, an epic and thorough investigation into the political and socio-economic machinations of pre-WWI America. But before all that, we have The Ride, and a few chapters of Bunny’s adolescence, in which we naively witness the power of Dad’s attention. And Dad is a powerful man, an oil man, hardworking, rulebender, full of proclamations and instructions, cheats and etiquettes regarding the ins and outs of life.  Bunny is the apt pupil, drinking up the specificity of Dad’s decree. Although I had read much of it before, years ago, with motivations I cannot remember, I very much enjoyed these opening chapters. There’s an energetic lilt to the prose, even thick as it is with detail. One really feels the bright, shining curiosity of Bunny’s personality. There is not an observation to be missed and all of it is regaled with an awesome wonderment. It reminded me of perhaps one of the richest scenes of Americana ever written, the opening chapter of Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Underworld too, gave us fantastic fictions of real life characters. Yet, also like Underworld, beyond the opening spectacle, I found Oil! disenchanting. Once Bunny grows up, and his attentions turn to the solidarity of the working class, I’m not sure I want this narrator anymore, this degree of mad, blind enthusiasm that would warrant an exclamation of the word "oil."

This novel is an unabashed political rally. If there were a foil to Ayn Rand, I suppose it is Upton Sinclair, with his own political aspirations and obvious leftish bent. Bunny is a rich kid socialist—scratch that, I’m not quite sure of his leanings. Oh gosh, I’m about it expose my ignorance. I’m so worried I am going to misrepresent some of the politics of this book that went right over my glazed and enervated reading that I think I will avoid addressing it at all. Suffice it to say, Bunny is exactly the type of person I cannot stomach. Wooed by intellectual ruminations, with nothing but time and money to explore his own ego, at one point he even relates himself to the Buddha. I’m a fan of the Buddha and his understated shrug: “there is suffering.” But I’m not a fan of the over-financed, over-educated, white, pseudo-masculine, philosophic musings. (Not for want of trying, mind you. I’ve slept-read through The Razor’s Edge AND Eat, Pray, Love.) Bunny, enamored by the brilliance of those around him whose political manifestations are borne of experience and need and misery—seems innocuous, but he carries no care. Therefore, I cannot care for him. Bunny does carry an acute awareness of his privilege and middling crisis of power. As he matures into his beliefs, he banally flirts with guilt over the hypocrisy of using his father’s wealth for direct mutiny against its source. Here would be an opportunity for some intrigue! But, no. Somehow, the love between father and son transcends this conflict, the one relationship of the book that would be interesting to risk. Even as Bunny is reminded by an oil cohort, Verne, about the disgraceful way in which he is dismantling his father’s legacy—Bunny carries on, and Dad enables him with a mysterious bemusement. Dad, Bunny likes to reminds us, began as a mule driver. It seems unlikely he would allow his life’s effort to devour itself like a grim Ouroboros, building to sustain its own destruction, but he does. And it is spectacularly Boring!

After all, Dad does not bestow the same grace on his daughter Bertie. There is a thread of disdain for the corruption of wealth on the women in this novel. Bertie is shallow and unlikeable, her occasional appearance is an annoying disruption from the work of the novel. The Mom of the book is grotesque in her greed. Bunny has warmth for her, but the reader is not allowed to understand why, as she is as flat a character as could be. The only women of wealth who are given dimension are Vee Tracy and Annabelle. Both are screen actresses, who must work for their money, even if their work consists of keeping their bodies impossibly slim and their boyfriends in the oil industries. Rachel, Jewish, homely and as whip smart and stalwart a character as Bunny’s hero Paul, suddenly falls for Bunny not because he worships her, but the other way around. All Bunny needs to do is kiss her and she’s melted, despite her superior intellect and conviction. I don’t buy it, but I needn’t, because there’s so little novel left at this point, and the inevitable tragedy of it all speeds us recklessly off the cliff.

I didn’t love this book, because I felt like I was being sold something I did not want to buy. I’m not a big fan of big ideas in literature, of didactic lessons, even as they align with my own moralistic leanings. I can see the merit of such pursuits, or, frankly, the propaganda. Oil! clearly represents a time capsule of the American political nuance of the early twentieth century, perhaps with some human compulsion that is absent from political texts of the time. The difference between writing a history, though, is thus: history is relatable by the sheer evidence of the person’s existence through the events they endured. It’s the Buddha’s noble truth, “all life is suffering” to which we can identify. But with fiction, all that exists is the manufactured suffering by the writer. And if I’m to be sold a grand political philosophy through imaginary suffering, there had better be some “life.”     

Wes: 

After a rather long lay-off, our book this time is Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Written in the mid-1920s, Sinclair is clearly trying to reestablish the fame and controversy of his very first novel, The Jungle, written in 1906. This one, however, is not quite of the same ilk, probably because fewer readers are as intimately concerned with oil products as they are with eating meatpacking products from the sordid Chicago stockyards. Instead, most Americans of the time probably recognized oil products as essential for building America’s growing industrial might. As it is, the book is an interesting tale about every conceivable aspect of oil production and refinement with a lot of human interest added into the bargain.

The story is told from the perspective of “Bunny”, a diminutive for J. Arnold Ross, Junior, son of a former California mule teamster but current oil wildcatter and wheeler-dealer. Running from about 1912 to the successful re-election of Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Bunny follows and observes his J. Ross, Senior in his dealings as he develops one oil field near Long Beach and another, at Bunny’s urging, on a property that would benefit one of his youthful friends, Paul Watkins and in future will be his. Considered a practical education, dad works him into his business but also supports Bunny in a life of luxury, sending him to top schools, supporting various romantic and youthful peccadilloes. But they’re always together in dealings with the Paradise field (drilling began on Watkins’ property near Paradise, California). Through the field’s development in his formative years, Bunny sees every aspect of how oil is discovered, leased, recovered, refined, and sold off. His dad’s plan was clearly to groom him to inherit a fortune when the time comes.

The basic conflict of the book is between capital and labor. We see the inner workings of both through Bunny’s eyes plus how both are affected by government bureaucracies, education, journalism, Hollywood, politics, and religion. But Bunny is a complete idealist versus a pure capitalist like his father. Everyone he meets seems to impact his outlook at the moment. He accepts the last person’s position until his next conversation with one of the opposing positions. By the end of the book he settles on the socialist position which, understandably, reflects the author’s real world position. By then, his father has been swindled out of the bulk of his fortune by his partner and the outcomes of President Harding’s Teapot Dome scandal. Bunny ends the book with a fraction of his expected legacy, marries his socialist magazine manager, and plans to build a socialist college (commune) deep in the California hills. 

The book is a very interesting read and was made into a recent movie (I still haven’t seen it but will to see how it relates to the book). I have several problems with some of the author’s descriptions. The most serious is his depiction of the Russian revolution. He touts the White Russians as the monsters killing everyone in sight. He apparently missed the Red Russian methods for achieving dominance after the downfall of the czar (the Bolsheviks killed the czar and his family after all). The Communist tyranny they set up resulted in more than 200 million deaths, primarily among the undesirables (deplorables?) in Russia. I suppose Sinclair deserves some slack as Stalin had only been in control a year or two when this story was written. I guess the Kronstadt incident, murders of the Mensheviks and other atrocities under Lenin were not well known at the time. I also know Sinclair hated Christianity (religion is, after all the “opium of the masses”, according to Marx- the Communist god). Sinclair apparently knows nothing about its real practices but deliberately wanted to mock it, as nearly everything he states in his descriptions of Eli Watkins’ antics is wrong.

Despite my objections, the book was an easy read – not complex or obscure at all. If nothing else, Sinclair is very forthright and honest in his views. He definitely is a good observer of life in general and provides a concise view of the self-interests of many characters in the oil business and the environment as it existed in the roaring 20s. I enjoyed reading it, especially the passages on how oil leases are forged, the technical details of drilling and recovering oil, and techniques for “cracking” the crude oil into its refined products. I rate this book as a 3 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).