A Novelist in the Making: A Collection of Student Themes and the Novels <i>Blix</i> and <i>Vandover and the Brute</i>

Norris' usual practice of naming. Although most of Norris' major male characters (McTeague and Vandover among them) have no first names, his women always do, and the "good" women are endowed with both first and last names. Turner and Travis are the same age, and both are almost ten years younger than their beaux, Vandover and Condy, just as Jeannette Black was a decade younger than Frank Norris. Turner is "a frank, sweet-tempered girl and very pretty," while Travis is "so pretty, so unaffected, and so good-natured." Both fit Condy's description of Blix as "a man's woman, a regular pal to him"-a concept Norris liked so much that he used the first phrase as the title of a lesser novel, published in 1899 along with McTeague and Blix. Drawing upon LeConte's theories, Norris portrayed these women as pure powers who lead the men they love to achieve the best that is within them, causing them to conquer their normal inclinations to brutality, sensuality, or vice, and assisting them to rise above their crude masculinity to a higher, more spiritual state. Condy, Vandover, and Norris himself. Shanghaied from the San Francisco waterfront and not altogether unwillingly forced to ship to Lower California, the hero, a recent Yale graduate, enjoys an escape from "his conventional life" as "a taxpayer, a police-protected citizen," into a series of melodramatic adventures with members of his city's Chinatown. He learns to make his way on a shark-fishing schooner, and eventually is left alone aboard ship with Moran, a huge, blonde, sea-roving, savage viking of a girl, possessed of the "purity of primeval glaciers." Their schooner is buffeted by whales, and in a wild fight with vicious beachcombers they capture a treasure in ambergris. Gradually the hero, like Vandover, loses his civilized character as "clubman and college-man," and "the half-brute of the stone age" leaps to life with "savage exultation." But unlike Vandover, as he becomes more primitive, he paradoxically grows to manhood. In this farrago of fantastic melodrama the nautical incidents come from Captain Hodgson, the tone of high society and derring-do are out of Richard Harding Davis, the philosophy of the cleft man is based on recollections of LeConte's classes, while the amalgam and the belief that nowhere "else but in California could such abrupt contrasts occur" are pure Norris. 21 CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR’S NOTE INTRODUCTION THE STUDENT THEMES BLIX CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. CHAPTER XIV. VANDOVER AND THE BRUTE CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. CHAPTER XIV. CHAPTER XV. CHAPTER XVI. CHAPTER XVII. CHAPTER XVIII. NOTES