Sister Carrie

I had fairly recently read An American Tragedy and picked up Sister Carrie more or less randomly when I was in New York earlier this year. With the latter being Theodore Dreiser's first novel (published in 1900 and thus 25 years earlier than the former) differences abound of course. Dreiser's naturalist and descriptive style - true very much to the novel of the 19th century and not the post-modern style emerging soon with writers such as Joyce or the great Döblin I recently discovered - is the same in both books. It makes for easy reading as it requires little concentration since everything that happens is explicitly spelled out for the reader. 

The subject matter is quite different though, or rather the result of the urban American way of living the author describes is quite different. In both novels a young character tries to make her (his) way in an urban setting. Here it is Sister Carrie trying to get a break on her own first in Chicago then in New York. And that describes aptly the scandal of the novel, on her own. Carrie effectively makes her way from one man to another (not too many really, but still), climbing the social ladder in the process until she is at its top on her own. It is undoubtedly a testament to the radical changing of morals that what feels like a perfectly normal behaviour to me (a woman living with one man, then another, then alone) was considered scandalous, even outrageous, at the time the book came out. To go back to Joyce (or Flannery O'Connor, same thing really) once more, where I as the (post-)modern reader have a hard time understanding their (at times) obsession with religious questions, the same holds true for this barriers breaking novel and its protagonist. In the end I enjoyed reading it but it's inner spirit, its fight, is very much a reflection of the conservative culture of the time, one that I note with mild interest but one that I hardly see reflected in my own life (and, less so, times) anymore.

An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy seems to be one of those early 20th century left-wing American classics that few people read anymore - as Irving Howe puts it in the afterword: "Do I exaggerate in saying that Theodore Dreiser has dropped out of the awareness of cultivated Americans?" Even writing this in 1964 - the original book having been published in 1925 - Howe most likely was right, yet the more important question probably is are those cultivated Americans right in having forgotten - or never heard of - him? Here the answer is far less certain.

I thought that An American Tragedy was too lengthy, too repetitive at times, of its 800 pages maybe a quarter could have been cut as they seemingly served only to repeat a point - a sentiment - that had been made abundantly clear previously. Still Dreiser provides an interesting point of view for early 20th century capitalist America, its social norms, religious predominance and hypocrisy, the moneyed social class structures. He tries to portray something that is very real then - and to the human sentiments of which I and everybody else could clearly relate to. 

As Dreiser put it himself: "A certain type of crime in the United States [...] proved very common. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition to be somebody financially and socially."

As cruel as it may sound I found Dreiser's novel much more interesting as an reflection of its time than as a literary work.