Had Émile Zola been able to see into the future, he might have thought better of insisting as strenuously as he did upon his status as a “naturalist.” By doing so, he attached his name to the most fashionable group of contemporary artists and writers (the term had been coined by Gustave Courbet and taken up by the influential Goncourt brothers, among other trend-setters), ensuring that his novels would be perceived as stylistically and intellectually up-to-the-minute, but the tag has proved something of a drag on his posthumous reputation. Pedagogues dearly love such handy rubrics, which allow them to spoonfeed a writer to their pupils, and Zola’s “naturalism” has been repeated as an article of dreary faith to generation after generation of high school and college students. I myself shied away from him for years, for the textbooks made him sound a grim fellow, obsessed with the gutter and with a peculiarly nineteenth-century brand of pitiless biological determinism.

What a surprise I had, then, twenty years after leaving school, when I picked up Nanaand discovered a writer apparently more of a symbolist than a naturalist, a metaphorical thinker with a dark sense of humor, a frequently indulged taste for the outrageous, the descriptive gifts of a painter, and the dramatic control of a filmmaker. It is true that the author was deeply concerned with social issues, but it would be hard to classify him as a “political novelist,” for he simply was not idealistic enough. In