Tropic of Cancer unabashedly depicts Millers' escapades as a down-and-out writer in Paris during the early 1930s, "bumming around" Montparnesse with a colorful, earthy, and rebellious group of expatriates and artists.
Miller is nourished by decay. He observes how the higher activities - love, sex, creation, fidelity, art - have lost their divinity, dignity, poetry. Sex seems to him dry and painful; work is absurd; death is meaningless, and literature is dead. The only sort of goodness we are now capable of is to blow ourselves to bits. But somehow Miller, despite his rage and pollution, seems innocent. His book seems a lament. His potency is founded in showing the cruelty and filth, but these would have no affect on him or us unless we also feel its opposites - kindness and purity. Whenever he records the ugliness of his surroundings, he has discharged them and their effects from his soul, as in a sort of exorcism. And this is why he appears an innocent soul. Because innocent souls have an unreasoned but keen taste for suffering, and nothing seduces them so easily as does the view of a martyr. In this instance, nature is the martyr; all of her processes polluted and corrupted by humans.
Miller's language is incisive, clear, potent, fresh...and new, a new sort of language, a language of the underworld translated into English. His fast-paced, absurdly wild and filthy existence is beautifully documented; there is something in the surrounding which reminds one of the film Casablanca, perhaps the charm of desperation.
He is prone to philosophies, and some readers will prefer the adventure to the contemplation. Also, his treatment of women is acutely unorthodox but should be further examined before being criticized.
Quotation: `I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am...' (from the first page)
