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A review by zeydejd
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
3.0
No doubt this goes on and on and on, but I solidly enjoyed it. Dreiser gets a bad rap for his prose being leaden and heavy, but I actually felt it quite poetic even if there were places where the novel itself could have been tightened up. The intimacy with which readers delve into Clyde Griffiths as a character swings back and forth throughout these 800 pages, a fact I didn't totally pick up on until reading the afterword. I was moderately impressed, though, in those moments when the reader is brought incredibly deep into Clyde's thoughts, inner torment, burning desires, etc. It felt honest and human, even as I felt myself despising Clyde with every additional chapter.
Although overall Dreiser seems to set up the details and events of the novel carefully and thoughtfully, I'm hung up on some of the extraneous tidbits that were peppered in (especially concerning Clyde's investigation and trial in the last third of the book) that didn't seem to serve a purpose, expository or otherwise. It almost felt as though they were written in to later come back to in a meaningful way, but instead were left hanging unsatisfactorily.
Although overall Dreiser seems to set up the details and events of the novel carefully and thoughtfully, I'm hung up on some of the extraneous tidbits that were peppered in (especially concerning Clyde's investigation and trial in the last third of the book) that didn't seem to serve a purpose, expository or otherwise. It almost felt as though they were written in to later come back to in a meaningful way, but instead were left hanging unsatisfactorily.