« One of the primary lessons of Zola’s work – the rage which he brought to the page – is a factor often ignored by present-day novelists. We seem to live in a tamer world than the one Zola inhabited, where we seem to have given up the presumption of the social power of our work. Literary life today is far more decorous and certainly less likely to exhibit a nod towards social conscience than the one Zola inhabited (…). So many of today’s writers are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it is not ours, as if we are only visiting, whereas Zola and other writers of his generation went headfirst into life, consumed it, critiqued, and were truculently at odds with it. »