by Henry Miller
First published 1993
Dion Moloch clocks in at Western Union each morning, trapped in work that degrades him daily. The job pays barely enough to sustain his crumbling marriage, where arguments replace conversation and resentment fills every room. When the walls close in, Moloch takes to the streets of early 1920s New York, but the city offers no refuge. Brooklyn transforms around him with new immigrants, unfamiliar voices, and alien customs that assault his senses. Each neighborhood he walks through reminds him of everything slipping from his control. Moloch lashes out at his circumstances, his wife, his employers, and the changing world that seems designed to crush him. His fury grows as he realizes he cannot escape the forces reshaping his life. This angry man wages war against his own existence, fighting for survival in a reality that threatens to swallow him whole. Miller's earliest surviving novel captures one man's desperate struggle to maintain his identity when everything familiar disappears.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century
Vibes: dark, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, man-vs-society
Setting: Brooklyn, New York
Period: 1920s
Hardcover · Harper Collins Publishers
Content warnings: depression, mental-illness