Sister Carrie (1900)

Theodore Dreiser's first novel remains one of his best and probably his most famous, along with An American Tragedy. It tells the story of a young woman at the dawn of the great American urbanization toward the end of the 19th century who escapes the country for the city and the various travails she endures in order to survive. She works in a Chicago factory, she encounters setbacks, she takes a lover, eventually she marries and ends up in New York, where eventually she divorces and finds success as an actress. Such realities of America's Gilded Age and its aftermath—the endless grasping for money because the agency that having it brings enables dictating one's social status, and thus the illusion of controlling one's fate—were ongoing preoccupations of Dreiser the former journalist and well-intentioned (and never actually overbearing about it) scold. His work is always far more engaging and engrossing than bare-bones synopses or the tiresome complaints about his "clumsy" language would lead one to believe. At more than 500 pages, this is actually one of his shorter works, but it flies by all too quickly. Sure, there's a lot of bland exposition here alternating with sections of dialogue dropped in like passages of transcripts. The question is why it works so well. Dreiser would seem to have an ability to abstract himself entirely out of the action he creates, implicitly suggesting that these are things contemplated from Olympian distances of remove, and inviting us to consider them from the heights with him. I think he knew exactly what he was doing. Even with all this abstraction and supposed distance, we recognize easily the urgency motivating these characters, caught up in circumstances they can barely even influence, let alone control. They are our own motivations and circumstances, and Dreiser has nailed them cold. And that is why you could well find yourself calling in sick one day in order to finish the "clumsily written" Dreiser novel that kept you up all night reading.

In case it's not at the library.