In March of 2024, The Atlantic posted their list of “The Great American Novels” of the last century. They then demanded, “You have to read them.” This is my diary of doing just that.
I promise I didn’t intend to start a blog and then take two months in between the second and third post. It’s just that the second novel on the list is An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, which clocks in at a brutal 874 pages. It took a while to get through it.
I read Dreiser’s Sister Carrie in graduate school and remember loving it because I was the type of young person who liked to read about a naive woman’s ambition being crushed by the weight of the world (cautionary tale!), and while An American Tragedy shares that same basic theme, it’s also…different. This novel seems to have been crafted as an on-purpose slog through the short life of a truly awful young man named Clyde.
But is he awful, or is he just normal?
Most of the characters in An American Tragedy are primarily concerned with how much things are worth. There are so many words devoted to how much things cost, including a prolonged scene near the beginning about a beaver coat and how a certain young woman named Hortense (who is Clyde’s crush, essentially) is angling to get it.
From page 117: Hortense “clapped her hands admiringly, while Isador Rubinstein, the elderly son of the proprietor, who was standing somewhat out of range of her gaze at the moment, noted the gesture and her enthusiasm and decided forthwith that the coat must be worth at least twenty-five or fifty dollars more to her, anyhow, in case she inquired for it. The firm had been offering it at one hundred […] But being of a sensual and somewhat romantic turn, he also speculated to himself rather definitely as to the probable trading value, affectionately speaking, of such a coat. What, say, would the poverty and vanity of such a pretty girl as this cause her to yield for such a coat?”
Trading value.
This business about the beaver coat goes on for pages and pages. Will Hortense buy the coat? She certainly can’t afford it herself. What man will she butter up enough so that he buys her the coat? Will it be Clyde? Probably not, because he’s working as a bellboy at the moment. How much will this “elderly son of the proprietor” overcharge her for the coat? There are pages of this!
The beaver coat —it’s only one example in the novel of something being valued against something else. Aside from the worth of things, there’s also talk of the worth of labor vs. leisure, freedom vs. confinement, and, perhaps most significantly and centrally to the plot, the worth of a pregnant young woman’s life vs. the possibility of Clyde’s marriage to a rich girl.
(It’s hardly even a possibility. We, the readers, are all smarter than Clyde and know that this girl would never really marry him because her old-money parents would never allow it.)
In the middle of page 280, Clyde’s thoughts are all muddled, per usual. A paragraph begins, “Confusion. Aspiration. Hours of burning and yearning.” Dreiser loves a long sentence, so these short phrases stuck out brilliantly. I just love this: “Confusion. Aspiration.” These two words played against one another encapsulate so much. Certainly, wanting something more out of life isn’t a tragedy in and of itself? How do we want something, gain something, and not turn into monsters?
A lot of life was lived while I was reading this book. Perhaps the most significant occurrence was my son’s sixth birthday. I find that, as a parent, what I want most is for my son to be brave and kind. Clyde is neither. Clyde’s mother, however, tried to raise her son right and loves him dearly, to the very end. Of course, she’s made some mistakes, but what parent hasn’t? So, what makes a person good? What force spins them toward righteousness? Is there a force even capable of doing this?
An answer does not comes from Dreiser, who seems to refuse easy solutions, but from the Introduction to the novel, which in my edition was written by H.L. Mencken: “…in An American Tragedy, [Dreiser] was still content to think of the agonies of mankind as essentially irremediable, and to lay them, not to the sins of economic royalists, but to the blind blundering of the God responsible for complexes, suppressions, hormones, and vain dreams” (12).
Grim.
The next book on the list is The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein, which I will retrieve from the library shortly. It is also close to a thousand pages, so I’ll see you again when I see you.
Thank you for reading.
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