"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 na-ture"--"Boston" "Evening Transcript "(1918). A naturalist novel writ-ten in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, "Salt "has interesting and provocative things to say about the educa-tion 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 inter-est. 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 Les-ter, along with George Hurstwood and Tom Buchanan, the three best characters in contemporary American fiction.
Griffith's paramour, Clarisse Rumsey, is cheap, lazy, and pre-tentious; 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 belove-making, 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.