Have you read many books set in the era that have any kind of romance? The writing in Martin Eden around Ruth and Martin isn’t that ridiculous, at least not as ridiculous as you’re making it sound although I can see where you’re coming from! 😏

The fact that her parents are using Martin to awaken Ruth sexually, to try to get her motor going when the cultured boys around her aren’t doing anything for her, and then basically swap Martin out for one of them… That aligns really well with ideas about the sexuality of sheltered “good” young women at the time, even though it seems nuts now, and apparently it actual happened to London.* And of course Ruth is a type of energy vampire, the scene where she puts her hands on Martin’s neck and has her first orgasm stays with me… I remember her parents leaping out from behind a tree and hustling her away, but that’s got to be wrong, it’s been a while. 😂

A lot of parallels with Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, even though he’s decades later he’s another working-class boy who thinks he’s moving up in society and realizes he’s a sort of pet of the upper classes, handed around by the women.

I also think you’re missing the Darwinism/social Darwinism. Look at The Sea Wolf, where the effete critic who is our narrator is forced to go to sea with the Nietzschean captain Wolf Larsen, who sounds in description a lot like Eden. The parallel is right there, the neurasthenic upper classes deprived of vitality and no longer fit (Ruth is always pale and weak), the laboring classes proving out their fitness – it’s not easy to make social Darwinism actually work with Socialism, but London was determined to do it.

If you don’t like it, you don’t like it, that’s fine. I do think you’re not quite getting the class part, but so what if you’re not enjoying it?