Zola and naturalism v realism, and two dystopian short stories

Catching up on some recent reading: I've been moving along through Emile Zola's 1867 novel (his 3rd, I think), Therese Raquin (oddly, published as a movie tie-in a few years ago under the title In Secret). Zola is known primarily as a writer in the "realist" tradition, with a deep interest in the social and political issues of his day - his most famous novel being Germinal, about a coal-miners' strike, and for J'Accuse, about the Dreyfus case. TR, however, feels more in the "naturalist" tradition, a portrayal in depth of one or more protagonists through examination of their interior lives as they develop and evolve over a course of time. We can see TR as a clear descendant of Madame Bovary; its eponymous protagonist, like Emma Bovary, is a woman trapped in marriage to a listless, feckless man, dreaming of a greater and more meaningful and sexual relationship, such as the ones she reads about in romance novels. The essence of the plot: TR and her husband's friend and co-worker, Laurent, plot to murder TR's husband, Camille, to clear the way for them to marry - all with dire and unforeseen consequences. The plotline has, as well, some similarities to the nearly simultaneous work, Crime and Punishment, at least insofar as it examines the psychological state of criminals who, nearly, get away with the crime. I'll post further on this novel after I finish reading it, probably tomorrow.

The current New Yorker issue is made up primarily or previously published pieces, including a story from the great George Saunders, I Can Speak(TM). I don't recall this story though I've probably read it before (it ran in the magazine in 1999); it's a typically frightening GS work looking at the absurdities of social - and corporate - behavior: composed as a letter from a corporate sales officer to a disgruntled customer regarding the new line of a product, a mesh-like mask that infants wear that "speaks" for them in supposedly amusing sentences and phrases and makes the child seem to be precocious. We may now - 20 years after the publication of the story - be closer than ever imagined to this kind of bizarre product, if not linked to babies' faces at least easily present before us in many photo apps and on social media. Scary.

Ditto for the story The Era, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It was clear as I was reading this story, the first in the alphabetically arranged selections in The Best American Short Stories 2019, that this piece owes a huge debt to Saunders, and I was not at all suprised to see that NKA-B has studied at Syracuse, where GS teaches. The story is about some sort of future state in which children are controlled and motivated by injection of a substance called The Good, with particular focus on a teenager who seems to have what today we'd call autism or Asperger's syndrome. The story, like the GS story noted above, is dystopian and somewhat frightening, though so far off on its own spectrum that we think more about the writer - how could he imagine all of this? - and less about the likelihood of these conditions manifesting themselves in our lifetimes, or ever.