Oil!

Rating NR Genre fiction Author Upton Sinclair Publisher Penguin

First things first:  Oil! is not There Will Be Blood.  Not even close.  The time line, the structure, and most of the characters’ names are different, so there is very little danger in getting the two confused, unless you happen to glance at Daniel Day Lewis’ face glaring at you from the cover.  What the two works do have in common, however, is a powerful use of imagery and a willingness to take scathing shots at greed, in both the worlds of business and religion.

Bunny Ross is the son of J. Arnold Ross, a mule driver who struck it rich in the California oil boom.  Bunny is the novel’s viewpoint character, and from Bunny’s point of view, his father is a king.  Ross is a larger than life figure, screaming in his car from drill site to drill site, greasing the system with stacks of bills to make his oil drilling business move smoothly, showing Bunny that business is conducted by making friends with public officials and giving them the money they can’t possibly make as public servants.  During a meeting of a neighborhood group whose property his father wants to buy, Bunny meets Paul Watkins, the nephew of the homeowner and the black sheep son of a fundamentalist goat farmer.  Paul has run away from home to try to earn money for his sisters because his father squanders his on missionaries, and Paul has stopped to borrow food.  When Bunny offers to give him money, he refuses it, preferring to earn his own way.  By turning down his father’s money, something he has never seen anyone do, Paul impresses Bunny, and he tries to emulate Paul’s habit of always telling the truth.  This is Bunny’s first lesson that there are different morals for different classes, as he finds it difficult to live up to the ideal when his manipulative mother digs for information about his father’s money.  As Bunny grows older, much of the conflict he faces centers around trying to apply his moral ideals to the world of class, money, and privilege into which his father is desperate to place him.

Hoping to help Paul’s family, Bunny convinces his father to check the Watkins farm for oil.  Once he finds it, to convince the extremely religious family to sell him the farm, J. Arnold Ross tries to convince them that their son Paul was a prophet sent by God to lead him to the farm.  Eli, the Watkins’ other son, decides that he must be this prophet, and uses Ross’ words throughout the rest of the novel to whip his followers into a frenzy and become a famous evangelist.  By the time drilling begins on the Watkins’ farm, Bunny is a young man nearing the end of high school, and Paul has returned to help work on the farm.  Paul has met educated men, and has begun devouring the works of Marx and Huxley and is well on his way to assembling a socialist world view.  Bunny spends most of the novel pulled between his father’s unchecked capitalism and Paul’s desire for violent overthrow of the system, a position only strengthened in Paul after his return from war in Europe. In the end, his father dead and his oil empire destroyed, Bunny, while not wholly embracing Paul’s revolutionary philosophy, finally follows his instincts and rejects his father’s greed.

While not quite up to the standard of his masterpiece The Jungle, Oil! continues Sinclair’s tradition of skewering social injustice and unthinking privilege.   He satirizes the roots of televangelism through Eli’s mindless parroting of Ross’ words and the even more mindless devotion of his followers.  The radio – in fact, all forms of media – are tools in this novel for all forms of stupidity, allowing Paul to reach a wide and gullible audience and distracting others with stories of celebrities while politicians are being bribed by oil men.  The oil industry itself is, of course, Sinclair’s biggest target, though this is hardly an environmentalist rant.  Sinclair seems to trust capitalism a bit more than socialism, but sees a terrifying failure to regulate and enforce standards, quite similar to his scathing attacks on the meat packing industry in The Jungle.  Unfortunately, Oil! did not have the social impact that The Jungle did on the country, but the novel holds up as a remarkable portrait of greed and moral conflict.