It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors' coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.

[…]
McTeague looked forward to these Sunday afternoons as a period of relaxation and enjoyment. He invariably spent them in the same fashion. These were his only pleasures—to eat, to smoke, to sleep, and to play upon his concertina.

The six lugubrious airs that he knew, always carried him back to the time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.

McTeague remembered his mother, too, who, with the help of the Chinaman, cooked for forty miners. She was an overworked drudge, fiery and energetic for all that, filled with the one idea of having her son rise in life and enter a profession. The chance had come at last when the father died, corroded with alcohol, collapsing in a few hours. Two or three years later a travelling dentist visited the mine and put up his tent near the bunk-house. He was more or less of a charlatan, but he fired Mrs. McTeague's ambition, and young McTeague went away with him to learn his profession. He had learnt it after a fashion, mostly by watching the charlatan operate. He had read many of the necessary books, but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them.

This is the beginning of Frank Norris' novel, McTeague. You can already tell how bleak it's going to be, huh?

We mentioned that the Naturalists were very interested in depicting social environments. Well, in the opening pages of this novel, we get tons of social environment. We learn that McTeague comes from a poor background, that his dad was a mean ol' alcoholic, and that his mom worked really hard so that her son could escape poverty.

We also see, in these opening passages, an emphasis on the idea of heredity. Is it a coincidence that McTeague likes to drink a lot of beer on his day off? Probably not. His dad was an alcoholic, after all. So by opening the book showing us McTeague getting his pitcher of beer, Norris is already suggesting the way in which we can't escape our inherited human nature.

Yup: in Naturalistland, we're doomed from the get-go.

McTeague is a famous Naturalist novel. The novel, of course, was the favorite literary genre of the Naturalists. And in the opening of this passage, we can begin to see why.

A novel, unlike a poem or a short story, really allows the author to dig into his characters and their social environments. In these opening lines Norris takes his sweet time in showing us McTeague's childhood, and his home environment. It's easier to do that in a novel than in a shorter literary form, like a poem or a short story. We get to linger over the important effects of having an abusive father and a doting, martyred mom… probably in the same way that McTeague does when he's awake late at night.