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A review by duffypratt
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
1.0
This is probably the longest really bad book that I've ever read. I gave up several times, and really can't say why I came back and ultimately persevered through it. I first gave up after this wonderful interior monologue passage:
"Gee, life was tough. What a rough world it was anyhow. How queer things went!"
Really? Gee! I might have come back to see if the writing could get any worse. And on that score, Dreiser did not disappoint. There's a literary atrocity on just about every page of this book. By the last third, Dreiser has basically done away with niceties, like subjects and verbs. The reductionism continues until we get passages like:
"But, oh, no! Oh, no! Not himself -- not that -- not his day. Oh, no. A whole year must elapse before that could possibly happen -- or so Jephson had said. Maybe two. But, at that -- ! . . . in two years!!!"
I wish I were exaggerating. Now, just imagine 900 pages of this. Much of it repetitious, and it getting worse and worse, sort of like Chinese water torture, but with exclamation points instead of drops of water.
But what of the characters? They are mostly notable for their shallowness and general unlike-ability. In over 900 pages, you would think that Dreiser might take the time to let us get to know some of them. Rather, he presents us with the broadest of cut-outs. Being generous, I'd say that he was doing something akin to kabuki theatre, and leaving his characters as archetypes to make the story more general. But I'm not feeling generous. So, instead, I think Dreiser basically hated everyone he was writing about, and couldn't bother to really get inside them or to humanize them, because then we (and more importantly, he) might come to like them.
As for the story: there's probably an OK short story here. Here it is. A guy leaves his evangelist family and goes off to make his fortune. He starts to work for his uncle, the owner of a factory. One rule of the factory is no relationships between supervisors and the female staff. He breaks the rule in secret. At the same time, he breaks into the local society and falls for a spoiled rich girl. He would like to abandon his factory worker girlfriend, but he knocked her up, and she could expose and ruin him. So he plots to kill her instead, and does kill her, though not exactly the way he intended. He is tried and executed.
Is it a tragedy? I was taught that tragedies had a tragic hero who suffered from some fatal flaw. Hamlet and indecision, Macbeth and ambition, Othello and jealousy. Without their flaws, these were all great men. Clyde Griffith is a bundle of flaws, but without any heroic characteristics that I could discern, except perhaps that people thought he was good looking. But as for flaws: he's stupid, vain, ambitious, self-centered. deceitful, lacking in empathy, a bit greedy, and so forth. So, despite the title, I don't see this story as a tragedy at all. Except perhaps for this: if the uncle's factory had allowed for dating of the workers, Clyde would never have broken into society, and might have settled for a humdrum, boring life with Roberta.
I've seen some people praise this for the candid look it takes at sex. But here's what I see. Two people have pre-marital sex, and they both die as a result of it. That's really forward thinking and candid. And even as far as that goes, Thomas Hardy covered this same territory much better. And then there's Anna Karinina.
I've also seen praise for the expose of society and ambition. But this book was published the same year as The Great Gatsby, and Gatsby, and again there is no comparison. Clyde's problem is not that he is ambitious. He is a little ambitious, but he seems more passive that anything else when it comes to his ambition, and it's definitely not presented as the cause of his downfall.
And yet, there must have been something compelling about this book. How else could I have willingly suffered through all 900 pages of it. I ask myself that, and if I were in a more generous mood, I might be able to come up with some reasons. But I'm not in a generous mood, and after so many pages of the writing getting worse and worse, I don't see any point in being charitable. Bad writing, bad story, bad characterization, bad social commentary. Bad, bad, bad! -- Bad!!!
"Gee, life was tough. What a rough world it was anyhow. How queer things went!"
Really? Gee! I might have come back to see if the writing could get any worse. And on that score, Dreiser did not disappoint. There's a literary atrocity on just about every page of this book. By the last third, Dreiser has basically done away with niceties, like subjects and verbs. The reductionism continues until we get passages like:
"But, oh, no! Oh, no! Not himself -- not that -- not his day. Oh, no. A whole year must elapse before that could possibly happen -- or so Jephson had said. Maybe two. But, at that -- ! . . . in two years!!!"
I wish I were exaggerating. Now, just imagine 900 pages of this. Much of it repetitious, and it getting worse and worse, sort of like Chinese water torture, but with exclamation points instead of drops of water.
But what of the characters? They are mostly notable for their shallowness and general unlike-ability. In over 900 pages, you would think that Dreiser might take the time to let us get to know some of them. Rather, he presents us with the broadest of cut-outs. Being generous, I'd say that he was doing something akin to kabuki theatre, and leaving his characters as archetypes to make the story more general. But I'm not feeling generous. So, instead, I think Dreiser basically hated everyone he was writing about, and couldn't bother to really get inside them or to humanize them, because then we (and more importantly, he) might come to like them.
As for the story: there's probably an OK short story here. Here it is. A guy leaves his evangelist family and goes off to make his fortune. He starts to work for his uncle, the owner of a factory. One rule of the factory is no relationships between supervisors and the female staff. He breaks the rule in secret. At the same time, he breaks into the local society and falls for a spoiled rich girl. He would like to abandon his factory worker girlfriend, but he knocked her up, and she could expose and ruin him. So he plots to kill her instead, and does kill her, though not exactly the way he intended. He is tried and executed.
Is it a tragedy? I was taught that tragedies had a tragic hero who suffered from some fatal flaw. Hamlet and indecision, Macbeth and ambition, Othello and jealousy. Without their flaws, these were all great men. Clyde Griffith is a bundle of flaws, but without any heroic characteristics that I could discern, except perhaps that people thought he was good looking. But as for flaws: he's stupid, vain, ambitious, self-centered. deceitful, lacking in empathy, a bit greedy, and so forth. So, despite the title, I don't see this story as a tragedy at all. Except perhaps for this: if the uncle's factory had allowed for dating of the workers, Clyde would never have broken into society, and might have settled for a humdrum, boring life with Roberta.
I've seen some people praise this for the candid look it takes at sex. But here's what I see. Two people have pre-marital sex, and they both die as a result of it. That's really forward thinking and candid. And even as far as that goes, Thomas Hardy covered this same territory much better. And then there's Anna Karinina.
I've also seen praise for the expose of society and ambition. But this book was published the same year as The Great Gatsby, and Gatsby, and again there is no comparison. Clyde's problem is not that he is ambitious. He is a little ambitious, but he seems more passive that anything else when it comes to his ambition, and it's definitely not presented as the cause of his downfall.
And yet, there must have been something compelling about this book. How else could I have willingly suffered through all 900 pages of it. I ask myself that, and if I were in a more generous mood, I might be able to come up with some reasons. But I'm not in a generous mood, and after so many pages of the writing getting worse and worse, I don't see any point in being charitable. Bad writing, bad story, bad characterization, bad social commentary. Bad, bad, bad! -- Bad!!!