A review by deegee24
Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser

5.0

This is a masterpiece by one of the greatest American novelists of all time. Dreiser is often derided by other writers for the awkwardness of his prose. This complaint is wildly overblown. It is true that Dreiser's prose style is often plain and occasionally clunky. It is also true that he sometimes interjects with half-baked evolutionary and economic theories as metanarrative. But "bad Faulkner" and "bad Conrad" are no less pompous and distracting than bad Dreiser. Dreiser is capable of some truly beautiful prose passages and writes more authentic dialogue than probably anyone. Furthermore, the sentence fetishists overlook Dreiser's exceptional skill at other fundamentals of fiction writing--such as narrative pacing, characterization, moral and psychological complexity, and world building. When you are first introduced to Jennie Gerhardt, she is a young, first-generation American girl looking for work as a hotel maid alongside her mother. You follow her epic journey as she is seduced by two powerful men. But although she is not exactly in control of her own destiny, her individual qualities are not fully extinguished by the end of the novel. She is as much a survivor as she is a victim--and the men in her life are shown to be deeply scarred by the diminishing spiritual and emotional rewards of material success in the Gilded Age. This is very different than, say, Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which is a much simpler and less insightful textbook case of literary naturalism.