The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair

Lifestyles of the rich and stupid

The Metropolis, a novel by Upton Sinclair, was published in 1908, just a couple years after his controversial breakthrough book The Jungle. The two novels are written in a similar muckraking, pro-socialist style, but The Jungle is much more eye-opening, compelling, and insightful than this tepid successor. By comparison, The Metropolis feels shallow and poorly thought-out.

Allan Montague is a lawyer born and raised in Mississippi. Despite his Southern upbringing, his father fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. After Dad’s death, Allan moves to New York City, along with his mother and cousin Alice. Allan hopes that, through his deceased father’s connections, he can find some profitable work in the big city. Allan’s younger brother Oliver already resides in New York. He lives the life of a wealthy man, but it is unclear what exactly he does for a living. Oliver is active in high society, and he introduces Allan, Alice, and Mom into his high-dollar social circles. The Montagues attend a series of lengthy and lavish parties in which no frivolous expense is spared. The hosts of these parties expend enormous amounts of money in an attempt to outdo one another. It’s unclear why exactly these millionaires would welcome the Montagues into their circle, since the family from Mississippi are merely upper middle class. Nevertheless, Allan Montague is the reasonable man through whose eyes we view the outrageously extravagant lifestyles of these kings and queens of New York society. 

The bulk of this book is just Sinclair rattling off examples of insane things the rich spend their money on, and how much those luxuries cost. This goes on for chapter after chapter. For example, a woman had a million-dollar coat that was made from the feathers of rare Hawaiian birds. Is this really the problem that’s plaguing American society? Not until Chapter 11, when Allan is hired as a lawyer to work on a lawsuit, does some semblance of a story actually begin. That plot thread, however, barely goes anywhere. If Theodore Dreiser wrote this novel, he would concentrate on the business, legal, and financial aspects of the story, perhaps to the point of inducing boredom. Sinclair, on the other hand, rushes through the legal case rather sketchily because he just wants to rant about the rich. He succeeds in getting his point across that the wealthy waste a lot of their money on stupid and useless stuff. There is a brief passage on the idiocy of fashion that’s rather well-said, but then Sinclair just resumes his catalog of expensive oddities: “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras,” and so on and so on.

Sinclair never acknowledges the fact that all this expenditure of wealth might trickle down to the artisans who make these luxuries, the merchants who sell them, and the servants who clean and maintain them. He will try to shock you with the fact that a rich old woman employs 32 servants, but that’s 32 people who have jobs. (I’m a liberal, and I’m making these arguments. That’s how annoying this novel is.) Sinclair’s typical modus operandi would be to contrast his exaggerated rich people with some exaggerated poor people­—i.e. look at what the wealthy are doing while these workers starve—but in this book he never gets around to the poor people, other than a few brief comments the aristocrats make about labor strikes. Sinclair is too busy reciting all these Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not examples of extreme wealth and waste.

In general, I like Sinclair’s work (The Jungle is a masterpiece, in my opinion), but at times he can get carried away with his exaggerated black-and-white socioeconomic rhetoric to the point of campiness. Such is the case with The Metropolis, and it’s not even fun.