I speculate in wheat, wheat, wheat

The Pit ***1/2

Frank Norris

Frank Norris' "The Pit" follows a few years in the life of Chicago wheat speculator Curtis Jadwin and his wife Laura just before the dawn of the 20th Century. While not nearly as baroque as Norris' masterwork, "McTeague," the novel has plenty of melodrama--the scene in which Laura desperately dresses herself as theatrical heroines, from Theodosia to Carmen, in order to woo Curtis away from his monomaniacal trading is pretty weird. In addition, Norris offers a lively literary description of the Chicago Board of Trade and the way commodities traders play havoc with global prices that doesn't seem too different from how things work today. 

The pit of the title refers prosaically to the trading pit at the board of trade and, more obliquely to the spiritual pits in which Curtis and Laura are entrenched during his period of obsession with cornering the market on wheat. On a grander scale, the pit refers to the insatiable maw of the market, which functions as a force of nature, like the medieval Fortuna or Hardy's purblind doomster. 

Norris is not a great novelist, but he's a worthy acolyte in the school of William Dean Howells. "The Pit" is nicely paced, Laura's and Curtis' struggles seem realistic if a bit overdramatized, and events come together very nicely at the end of the book, as minor characters swirl around the central couple, loyalties shifting nearly as much as the price of wheat upon which Curtis is so fixated.

Okay, so there's no caged canary or handcuffed corpse in Death Valley or rolling around naked in gold coins like in "McTeague," but there's still plenty of excitement and greed (with apologies to Erich von Stroheim).