Been busy on the draft blog, with updates on Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer, Kyle Gaedele.
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Clyde Griffiths is dead, and it’s about freaking time already. It took Theodore Dreiser over eight hundred pages to tell a story that could have been told in under half that. An American Tragedy
*It’s #16 on the Modern Library 100, #88 on the Radcliffe 100, and on the unranked TIME 100, all of which are limited to English-language novels of the 20th century. It’s also #46 on The Novel 100
The story, in brief: Clyde Griffiths is raised in poverty by a pair of non-denominational missionary parents, and rejects their lifestyle and religion to strike out on his own. At every turn, his attempts to move himself forward socially and economically are stymied by his attraction to and obsession with the fairer sex. Eventually, he’s taken in by his wealthy uncle and given work in that man’s collar factory, where he meets and seduces a simple country girl, Roberta Allen. When Clyde finds that society girl Sondra Finchley is interested in him, he ditches Roberta to pursue Sondra, only to find out that Roberta is pregnant with his child and (after failed attempts to abort the baby) insists that he marry her. So he hatches a plan to kill Roberta, and Roberta ends up dead even though Clyde may have had a change of heart at the last second. He’s quickly caught, tried at great literary length, and executed. Fin.
It could easily have been a story of great drama, but it’s not. For one thing, most readers of the book know the ending, which was true when it came out because the case on which Dreiser based the novel was a national sensation, the O.J. Simpson trial of its day (except that the defendant was found guilty and executed).
It could also have been a brilliant character study, but poor Clyde is as narrow as Doug Fieger’s tie and has so little nderstanding of his own actions that it’s hard for me to make any convincing case as to his motives. The closest I could come is to label him a narcissist, since he tends to think of everything bad as happening “to him,” notably Roberta’s pregnancy which was most certainly not happening to Clyde in any physical sense.
It doesn’t even work as a polemic. At first it looks like an indictment of religion, or of Puritanism, but that falls by the wayside when Clyde leaves his parents. It could be a criticism of misspent youth, of alcohol, or of venal behavior by “loose” women, but none of those themes sticks around long either. The longest single theme is that of the caste system found in the upstate New York town where Clyde’s uncle and family live, a system that finds Clyde caught in between as the part-owner of a surname associated with success, status, and wealth but himself poor, uneducated, and socially awkward. But then Clyde kills Roberta, gets arrested, and the rich/poor issue is mostly forgotten.
If there’s anything worth pondering in An American Tragedy, it’s whether Clyde was legally guilty of the murder. Clyde sets up the entire crime, then at the last second has some sort of mental apoplexy and doesn’t quite go through with it … but Roberta falls out of the boat, Clyde probably knocks her in the head, and he definitely doesn’t bother to save her as she drowns. Is it murder if he meant it but he didn’t mean it but he meant it anyway? I sure as hell thought so, which made the trial – on which Dreiser spends the better part of 300 pages – as dull as pitcher fielding practice.
And as for the prose, well, Dryser might have been a more appropriate moniker, for the author was no magician with our language, a view to which my friends at TIME also subscribe. The prose wasn’t leaden; it was eka-leaden. To wit:
But in the interim, in connection with his relations with Roberta no least reference to Sondra, although, even when near her in the factory or her room, he could not keep his thoughts from wandering away to where Sondra in her imaginary high social world might be. The while Roberta, at moments only sensing a drift and remoteness in his thought and attitude which had nothing to do with her, was wondering what it was that of late was beginning to occupy him so completely. And he, in his turn, when she was not looking was thinking – supposing? – supposing – (since she had troubled to recall herself to him), that he could interest a girl like Sondra in him?
The whole book is like this, all 353,014 words of it. Another typical Dreiser move is the extended double negative:
Nevertheless she was not at all convinced that a girl of Roberta’s looks and practicality would not be able to negotiate an association of the sort without harm to herself.
You parse that sucker, and get back to me in a week when you’re done.
So … why did I stick it out? For one thing, because it’s on four of those book lists, and while I may not reach 100 on any of them, it pushed me one closer. But it also stood as the last unread novel from my years in school: It was originally assigned to me in my senior year of high school, in the fall of 1989. I got to page 25, hated it, bought the Cliffs Notes, and wrote the paper off that. That’s the same class for which I didn’t read Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Next up: Dr. Michael Guillen’s Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics
So in fact the titular tragedy was that you chose to read the book?
Thanks for the warning on this one. I can’t stand short books that get crammed into long tomes. In that sense I recommend avoiding Elizabeth Kostova.
I enjoyed Five Equations quite a bit, and I’d also recommend The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. A good, short, popular science/math book is a good thing.
Also, that first prose sample almost looks like an excerpt from Engrish.com.
Keith, have you ever read Blindness, by Jose Saramago? I’d love to read your impressions of it. I thought it was amazing.
If I had written either of those excerpts in any of my college-level english courses I most likely would have failed on the spot. Yikes.
Keith, I haven’t read An American Tragedy, but I am currently reading The Financier for an American Naturalism class. There isn’t a student in my class who cares for the book, including me. The book is just 600+ pages of Dreiser’s dull prose, descriptions of economic issues that went over my head, and not even half of an attempt at character development.
P.S. – cool note, if you google eka-leaden, this blog post comes up as the first result
Wow thanks for the heads up on this one, Keith. It has been sitting near the top of my queue for a few months now because I kept finding one more smaller book I could knock out in a week or less, and from the look of this review I am glad I kept procrastinating. Those excerpts were brutal. I was skimming over them already, so there’s no way I would have made it through the entire thing.
Have you or will you read Sister Carrie?
I thought that was immensely better than AT with obvious themes and a compelling character.
Brian – Have not, probably won’t.
Seth – Have not, probably won’t.
George – Indeed, but I felt obligated to do it. The book has taunted me for two decades.
Ugh, Dreiser is an unwelcome name from my past. I read Sister Carrie for an American Fiction course in college and found it every bit as stuffy, maudlin, and pointless as you apparently found American Tragedy. I wouldn’t have been compelled to read any more of his work anyhow, but this just steels my resolve.
Re: Blindness
As someone with degenerating vision and genuine fear of going blind, I found the opening 20 or so pages of Blindness to be on par with just about anything I’ve read. After that, the book turned to uglier matters: rape and assault and alienation and fear and persecution. And while I saw that there was something to come out of it, I eventually needed a little break from all the rape and put it down, and haven’t picked it back up. Nor watched the movie. That was 3 or 4 years ago. It’s on the shelf somewhere, but, that’s a strong and ugly book.
Hello KLaw, I was just wondering what translation of Master and Margarita you read when you named it as your favorite book, since there are a few out there, including some that are translated off of the original censored Soviet work.
I agree completely about Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy”.
Give me James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan”, an honest well-observed trilogy with guts. I found the Lonigan trilogy vivid, and Studs’ short and insensitively brutal life surprisingly moving.
I was baffled by the college academic view back in college in the 1960s that Dreiser wrote Literature and Farrell wrote potboilers. (I understand Farrell’s reputation has improved in the decades since.)
Farrell’s depiction of the lower Irish-American world of 1920s and 30s Chicago is marvelously evocative.
Have you read it, Keith?
I’ve avoided the book because of its length and because I’ve heard similar things about its lack of depth. I did enjoy the Elizabeth Taylor film based on the book, _A Place in the Sun_, though.
I’ve always been interested in this story as I worked a couple summers on the lake where Grace (the real woman) died. She supposedly still haunts the lodge I worked at, but I never saw her. I then lived in Cortland, NY just blocks away from where Grace lived and the factory where she worked and met Chester. It’s a fascinating story. I suspect the book is ranked so high more because of the quality of the source material than because of Dreiser’s skill.
On another note, Keith, do you follow The Morning News Tournament of Books? It’s a great way to find new books and read different takes on the year’s most-hyped lit. Yesterday, Jonathan Franzen’s _Freedom_ faced off against Emma Donoghue’s _Room_ in the quarterfinals. Check it out.
I loved An American Tragedy. I see it as the inspiration for Seinfeld – a loathsome, self-interested character who has the world come to him. Even the ending is remarkably similar.
Dreiser is somewhat difficult. His roots are in journalism and by many accounts he was insufferable as a person. I see him as having a unique ability to illustrate what’s venal about the American spirit. Sinclair Lewis was in the same vein, but was a better story-teller and his characters were more sympathetic.
Like any 100-year-old fiction, you also have to overcome the vernacular differences and the culture differences. Subtle, but it does make immersion difficult.