An American Tragedy (1925)

Theodore Dreiser's "first novel since 1915" is genuinely a great American novel of the 1920s and inevitably invites comparison with The Great Gatsby, published the same year. At something like five times the size, Dreiser's novel is certainly the most imposing. In a comparison of language, perhaps, is where Dreiser's nagging reputation as a poor writer may find some origins. Not only is Fitzgerald's lustrous language one of the fine points about Gatsby, but also An American Tragedy does have some remarkably deplorable passages—I had always wondered why Dreiser had the reputation, and now I think I know. Most of the last third seems to refrain from direct verbs altogether, preferring to use the gerund form, which begins to feel like moving through pitch—the judge deciding, the lawyer presuming, the gallery gasping, the defendant worrying, the investigator scheming. I think it might be the worst I've ever seen, at least within the bounds of formal literature. Still, it does not diminish the blunt force with which Dreiser imagines and moves his characters about. Clyde Griffiths, at the precipice of a career that could have shot to the skies like Jay Gatsby's, is instead felled, by his circumstances—the inferiority of his upbringing in the naturalist fashion, at which Dreiser has never been better—and equally by his choices. Together they sketch Clyde's character, unique yet of an unmistakably 20th-century American stamp, indeed archetype. An American Tragedy is a big fat tome, with clunky writing, but it is a pulpy, breezy, gripping read, as all the forces of the narrative are brought to bear. All of Clyde's decisions, good and bad, are arrived at transparently. The predicament in which he finds himself is aching and relentless. At some point, likely, readers depart from Clyde's choices and begin to disapprove—strongly. But the route to that place is so lullingly banal that it's really hard to say that moment is going to be the same for everyone. The second of the book's three sweeping movements was most interesting to me, a novel of manners that studies American class distinctions closely. The crime and courtroom drama are fine, but increasingly wordy. Still, obviously, this is one not to miss if you care anything about Dreiser and/or 20th-century American lit.

In case it's not at the library.

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.