Gervaise Macquart and her two young sons have been abandoned by her lover, Lantier, who has run off with another woman. Gervaise decides that her life will be far less difficult if she gives up men completely, but she does not keep her promise to herself for very long, as she is unable to resist the advances of a roofing engineer called Coupeau. He doesn't drink and he seems reliable, and so she agrees to marry him. Their wedding is particularly memorable - and original, chaos that is not so much organized as spontaneous, but a wedding that makes both bride and groom extremely happy.
It has always been Gervaise's dream to open up a laundry of her own. After years of rotten luck, the cards seem to start falling in her favor, and it just so happens that she finds herself able to make enough money to make her dreams come true. She opens a laundry of her own. Believing that she could not be any happier, Gervaise's life is enhanced even further when she and Coupeau welcome a baby girl into the family, whom they call Nana. Life, she believes, could not get any sweeter, and the family are both happy and blessed.
Unfortunately, the tides turn, and things start going downhill for the family. Coupeau is injured in a roofing accident when he falls from the roof of a hospital. His recovery is long and slow, but convalescence seems to suit him, and eventually he comes to enjoy lying around all day doing nothing. He becomes lazy and reluctant to work. He turns to alcohol, which changes him enormously because of his previously teetotal lifestyle. Abruptly, he becomes an angry, alcoholic bully who brutally beats his wife. Gervaise tries to gloss over the cracks and keep her family together but to no avail. She cannot beat him and so she joins him; Gervaise becomes as idle and as lazy as her husband, but still wants to show off a flashy and enviable lifestyle. She starts to spend the money that they have saved on extravagant parties and this leads to a debt that spirals out of control.
As if things cannot get worse, her shiftless lover Lantier returns to the home, which pleases Coupeau because he is not really interested in Gervaise anymore. He is not interested in living either, and is overtaken by illness and malady. His spiraling bad health is the final straw for Gervaise. She cannot cope; she loses the laundry she worked so hard for and sinks into a depression that only alcohol seems to be able to blur. Things are so bad at home that Nana runs away, and works on the streets as a prostitute.
Gervaise and Coupeau are consumed by melancholy, debt, physical hunger and alcoholism, and die hard and lonely deaths. Gervaise's body lies for days, festering, in the house, nobody noticing her absence until her neighbors realize that she is absent. Even in death, they look down on her.
