Zola's Germinal

Of course, Zola is famed for his realism, and Germinal is naturalistic, admirably so. But he is also unbelievably depressing. Germinal is about a failed strike by miners who are defeated by capitalism and hunger. Along the way, the same family has the senile grandfather die while strangling a local Lady Bountiful, has a son become handicapped in a mining accident and then work in such clouds of dust he's clearly going to die shortly of lung disease, the father and daughter die in an endlessly described other accident, and the novel close on the mother going back to work at 40 saying: my son and I make 50 cents a day. If there weren't six of us, we'd have enough to eat. It's an excellent novel, but I got depressed reading it. It depresses me all the more to think of all the mining jobs around where I live.