“A finely significant novel written with deep understanding of the facts and with a spiritual insight that does not flag even for a moment as it throws light into the dark corners of human nature”—Boston Evening Transcript (1918). A naturalist novel written in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, Salt has interesting and provocative things to say about the education of American upper-middle-class males and about the power of sex to overcome a man’s deep distaste for a woman’s personality.
As a “criticism of life” the novel today seems simply the herald of a day when loud voices are less noted because all voices are loud. Today its vivid characterizations are its primary interest. Lester Adams, Griffith’s alcoholic half-brother, whose days and nights are mired in an unchanging routine of newspapers and whiskey, manages to preserve a semblance of heart and an odd little spark of integrity. F. Scott Fitzgerald considered Lester, along with George Hurstwood and Tom Buchanan, the three best characters in contemporary American fiction.
Griffith’s paramour, Clarisse Rumsey, is cheap, lazy, and pretentious; she is dull and almost illiterate; she is absurdly affected, but she has two qualities that enchain her reluctant lover: her obvious passion for him and her skill at dancing. As Auchincloss points out in the Afterword, “Today, her dancing would be lovemaking, but before 1914 a girl who tried to be respectable would endeavor to put the latter off at least until she had hooked her man.” Griffith and Clarisse are married and Clarisse bears him a son then dies of a pulmonary embolism as Norris manipulates the plot to redeem Griffith and to denounce the American boarding school and university.
