Moloch: or, This Gentile World

Overview

Henry Miller's Moloch: or, This Gentile World, written in the late 1920s but published posthumously in 1992, is a raw, autobiographical first attempt at the voice he would later perfect. Set in New York City, it follows an alienated office worker and aspiring writer who rages against a mechanized, commercial America while sinking into personal chaos. The title invokes the devouring idol from the Hebrew Bible, casting modern urban life and corporate labor as a cult that consumes human vitality and imagination.

Plot

The narrator, trapped in a soul-deadening job at a telegraph company, moves through days of petty office politics, tedious routines, and humiliations that feed his fury at "the gentile world" of commerce and respectability. At home, a failing marriage corrodes further under money troubles, jealousy, and sexual frustration. He lurches between dingy apartments and cheap hotels, between domestic battles and feverish pursuits of affairs, forever plotting a literary escape that never quite occurs. The story unfolds as a sequence of episodes, arguments, drunken night walks, erotic encounters, and caustic monologues, rather than as a tightly shaped narrative. Dreams of liberation through art or Europe flare up and collapse; attempts to write are sabotaged by self-loathing and compulsive theatrics; and each small compromise at work deepens the sense of spiritual defeat. The book closes less with resolution than with exhaustion, the protagonist still circling his grievances as the city grinds on.

Characters

The central figure is a self-dramatizing, volatile narrator, seething with resentment against employers, colleagues, and the social order. His wife is both partner and antagonist, alternately pleading and combative, cast by his narration as a barrier to freedom even as she reflects his own instability. Lovers and bohemian acquaintances drift through as projections of his desire for release. The bosses and clerks are sketched satirically as cogs and minor tyrants. Nearly everyone appears filtered through the narrator's corrosive subjectivity, which both energizes the prose and narrows its sympathy.

Themes

Moloch frames modern America as an idol that demands sacrifice: of time to clocks, of spirit to money, of intimacy to transactional routine. The "gentile world" signals the reign of the literal, the respectable, the standardized, a culture hostile to the ecstatic and the marginal. Masculinity under pressure and the uses and abuses of sexual freedom form a core preoccupation, with desire presented as both revolt and compulsion. The book is also burdened by bigoted outbursts and misogyny, reflecting the narrator's prejudices and the period's worst currents; they are neither softened nor justified, and they complicate any identification with the voice. Art is held up as redemption, yet repeatedly sabotaged by vanity, distraction, and rage, so that the writing project itself becomes a mirror of the narrator's stasis.

Style and context

Stylistically, the novel is an apprentice work: jagged, repetitive, and often overheated, but already pulsing with the invective, rhapsody, and obscene candor that would characterize Miller's later books. The urban setting is rendered as an infernal machine of timetables, pneumatic tubes, crowded streets, and neon; the inner life arrives in torrential, improvisatory riffs that break the decorum of the era. Written years before Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Moloch anticipates their themes while lacking their formal daring and hard-won comic poise. Unpublished in Miller's lifetime and issued in 1992 from his manuscripts, it stands now as a document of emergence: a self-portrait taken at the threshold, with the city roaring and the idol's furnace blazing, and a writer learning to turn outrage into art.