The Sins of Society.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 22, 27 May 1908, Page 49

The Sins of Society.

Mr. Upton Sinclair, who made a sensation some time ago [>y his story, “The Jungle,” in which he severely attacked the meat-canners of Chicago, has written a novel, “The Metropolis,” scarifying the Four Hundred of New York. The method, according to “The Times,” is photographic, with all a photographer’s odd mixture of unreality and realism. On a flat screen pass a succession, hardly even a series, of nightmare scenes that have little vital unity beyond the stern figure—the skeleton at the feast—of a single manly ingenu, whose stomach is too queasy for the carouse from which he is seen to fly as the exhibition ends. With the due qualifications proper in a comparison of the classics with a work of mushroom and hot-bed growth, the method is that of Tacitus. Every discoverable evil and crime is painfully sought out and “taken,” and you come away from the spectacle with the feeling that every home in New York is a sink. The things, mortal or spiritual, that the

world has decided to regard as most holy are not defiled, but dragged into the service of jaded appetites. The ordinary blasphemy is not enough to satisfy the cloyed taste of this dominant herd of parasites. Heliogabalus feasts, Phaethon expeditions, Decameron nights, Faust-like gamblings, are described in Mr. Sinclair’s “strong” style, varied occasionally by epigrams. “After such a victory,” says a Wall - street gambler, “one felt in a mood for Christmas festivities.” There is a sense of the endless aimlessnes of a false society in the comment. "All the world seemed doing as it pleased and no one seemed able to stop it.” Unfortunately, now and then Mr. Sinclair throws up his proper work as a writer for the exclusive use of the

muck-rake. Within 20 pages or so ho piles up a heap that even men of strong tissue can scarcely approach without physical repulsion.