I didn’t finish this book. Couldn’t do it. At the time, I might have felt a little ashamed when I didn’t pick it back up. But in the cold light of 2024 I feel fine about it. There was no way to press on. Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) drove me into a ditch, and I got out and walked.
Clyde Griffiths, the anti-hero of this 1925 best-seller, mirrors Walter White in some ways with his slow descent into hapless evil; he's just not as intelligent or as interesting. Clyde is brought up by poor evangelical parents, who make a slim living off of street preaching. His first and only truly self-driven action is made when he decides he's had enough of the grim, shameful poverty his parents are cursed with, and pursues new avenues of making his way in the world. He finds a well-paying job as a bus boy at Kansas City's finest hotel, the Green-Davidson. Doesn't sound like a bad idea, right? He's handsome in a melancholy way, and charmingly sensitive if not very deep, and he's moderately successful with people. It's not an awful beginning, and I actually enjoyed the wonders he experienced of a big world, new friends, new challenges; normal things for a young man.
Well from there Clyde inexplicitly catches the bug: a hunger for riches, luxury and sensual delights, brought on ostensibly by the hotel's clientele and atmosphere. He falls for the worst, most conniving girl in town, Hortense Briggs (name says it all), who sucks the life and hard-earned cash out of him like an elusive mosquito. You soon find the book's other characters, to continue the insect metaphor, buzzing around Clyde like dumb flies. Though a little fatter perhaps from experience, something our hero so desperately needs but just can't seem to get.
The major arc occurs when Clyde gets in touch with his wealthy uncle in the fictional town of Lycurgus, NY. The uncle is a shirt-collar magnate who feels something for his long lost nephew, and decides to offer him something supervisory but menial in his factory. It goes little farther than that however, and he and his conservative family are unwilling to take the next steps into integrating his nephew into upper-class society, something Clyde yearns for in his small bedroom at night. He is condemned to fend for himself in the small town, complete with it's own set of petty morals and prejudices, shared and enforced by rich, working, and poor. Dreiser however supplies Clyde with the perfect escape from his slavery to the social climb, in the form of a new factory worker, the innocent and lovely Roberta Alden. They fall in love almost instantly, and their courtship is beautiful to watch. Sneaking out late at night to exchange sweet-nothings on desolate country roads, boating together on a lake, taking a secretive day-trip to another town to dance and laugh out of sight of Lycurgus' bigoted opinions. But disaster strikes when an extremely fetching daughter of a Lycurgus tycoon encounters Clyde and discovers she might like him. She decides to court him, and invites him to a society ball, more to piss off the powerful Griffiths than out of love for Clyde. Clyde, of course, is overwhelmingly happy, and decides to wean off Roberta post-haste.
This is where I stopped. Spoiler, Clyde ends up pushing poor Roberta off a boat into a deep lake. And he doesn’t get away with it.
Much like Breaking Bad, I could not watch one horrible, stupid mistake after another, and the eventual, stupid self-destruction. Mostly though it was the writing that did me in. And I am happy to say that even Dreiser's staunchest defenders didn’t omit his massive faults as a writer. In the afterward of my edition, writer and critic Irving Howe describes Dreiser as "crushing the English language in a leaden embrace", or Time Magazine's "[Dreiser] takes a pipe-layer's approach to writing," while the British pile on more biting views, like publisher Rupert Hart-Davis saying "Theodore Dreiser's books are enough to stop me in my in my tracks--that slovenly, turgid style describing endless business deals, with a seduction every hundred pages as light relief," or literary scholar F.R. Leavis "seems as though he learned English from a newspaper." All of these sentiments are true. He fumbles with authentic dialogue, bogs himself down with plain worded verbosity and his characters wade in ankle deep shallows. I felt trapped, and looking at other attractive books waiting the my shelf, I bowed out.
Irving Howe, however, insists in the afterward that An American Tragedy is a masterpiece. He includes some other reviews by normal-sounding people. Dreiser is a pipe layer of words, but the pipes create a crude, complex beauty that towers with creativity and passion. Dreiser isn’t described as an educated man when you read up on him, which might translate into a disdain for literary finesse. But his main characters possess a commonality in direction, an "absolute" end, something visible but unattainable. They represent a new generation of climbers, fighting and sacrificing everything to get at the top. In Howe's afterward he quotes the French sociologist Emile Durkheim who "suggested in Dreiser's day that when men speak of a force external to themselves which they are powerless to control, their subject is not God but social organization." Dreiser captured a Wall Street mentality, soulless materialism and social dominance being the only route to happiness and success. An American Tragedy as well as his other works, are colossal vehicles of this message. Dreiser stands beside Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos as authors who decried the new money, yellow journalism and the horrors of factory work of the 20th century.
But let’s go back to the point—this book was the worst conveyance.
Or let’s take Edith Wharton. Her Age of Innocence (1920) hits similar points—a swoon-worthy romance snuffed by the same lustful social climbing and moral bankruptcy of the time. But just so much better.
Brilliantly subtle with class, societal history, and money, Wharton stitches together an upper-crust Manhattan at the peak of the Gilded Age. Wealthy families boast quietly of their Dutch or English roots, chide their youth from Victorian pulpits, and decry foreigners and Catholics in fashionable voices. Newland Archer is Wharton’s Clyde Griffith, a likeable, sensitive guy already a member of that clan with his whole life planned out ahead for him. A beautiful (and acceptable) wife and job also to boot. Like Clyde, though, he’s pulled and pressured away from a truer-calling: an appreciation for art and a love for a woman with more fiber. He falls for his cousin Ellen, freshly divorced from a Polish count and full of life. They conduct their affair only through painful trysts in cities distant from New York, though they both know deep down it will never work. Newland begins to spin out as he realizes he can’t take basic steps towards his happiness without a monstrous falling out with his family and position. Transpiring events more or less make the decision for him to not take the leap, and remain intact but unhappy.
It might be unfair to make this comparison. You might argue An American Tragedy is more in line with something by Euripides than Wharton with its violence and physical betrayal. And that Newland was born into wealth and Clyde to street-preachers, not reaching far beyond his range as an uneducated innocent from the Midwest. The trajectory already very different.
And maybe that’s it: Dreiser’s work feels more staged—almost like he forced characters into rooms they didn’t want to enter. That’s an author’s prerogative, even though I may not like it. It feels to me political. Howe mentions Dreiser practiced "a peculiarly thoughtless brand of communism,” (not to mention antisemitism) that tended to eschew art and nuance, and maybe other things that might make a book good. The result is Clyde: a colorless, sad puppet completely taken by the shallowest glamor and prestige a new world has to offer, the '"absolute.” It’s painful to watch.
I’ll say An American Tragedy is a useful road-marker. It maybe even more relevant today, in a generation of reaching the "absolute," of supremacy on social media, and a loss of simple, personal successes that truly make who we are. I won’t recommend it, but give it a go if you feel up to it.
Perhaps An American Tragedy was so popular when it was published because its’ hero was from the bottom of society, not NYC upper class. It echoed more realistically with more people but was ultimately only a literary stepping stone in American readers’ understanding of the vapidity of materialism and the ugliness of social class. Too dated and too labored, Dreiser’s books don’t resonate now. Many of Wharton’s novels are still relevant and interesting to read in 2024 because the writing is so wonderful and the history and characters still recognizable now.
«I didn’t finish this book. Couldn’t do it.»
Me on ~page 200 of all books with multiple perspectives, when the perspective shifts to the boring character.