“Well, this certainly looks like a lot of words”
I missed any reference to Dreiser in school, but his name has come up a few different places as an important voice in early 20th century American literature, so I thought I’d check him out.
The first word that comes to mind when I think of An American Tragedy is thorough. This is neither a compliment nor a criticism, merely an observation. Dreiser mines his characters lives, motivations, and daily actions with painstaking detail, plumbing pages-deep into psyches and chronicling activities with a relentlessness that can be numbing at times. The exhaustive (and at times exhausting) description was most distracting early on, and I nearly put it aside, but as the pages passed and the story emerged from its lengthy preface, I found the sheer weight conjured its own momentum, and the last half of the book was genuinely compelling reading.
The story focuses on Clyde Griffiths, a boy of no means who wishes to make it in the world, and almost does so by the grace of having a successful uncle who runs a large collar manufacturing concern outside of Albany (a region that, in a bit of serendipity, I had heard referenced less than a week before picking up this book as the 19th century collar manufacturing capital of the world; the source of this reference, of all things, was the radio broadcast of a Frontier League baseball game).
Once established as a department manager, Clyde catches the eye of Roberta, one of his employees, and despite a proscription on inter-company romance, the two begin an affair. At the same time, Clyde becomes enamored with a wealthy and attractive socialite named Sondra. Improbably, Sondra begins showing reciprocal interest in him, offering a window into a world of wealth and privilege that he had, by grace of his surname, glimpsed, but because of his meagre beginnings could not otherwise truly reach. It is at this moment that Roberta announcing she is pregnant, leading a desperate Clyde down a dark and treacherous path.
Though published in 1925, the distant omniscience of the narrator and baroque diction of the prose make it feel more like a Victorian novel than something of an age with Faulkner, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald. Readers might be off-put by this literary atavism (not to mention its sheer length), but I found the book ultimately rewarding.