**some spoilers**There are some classics you read because you know they’re classics - they’ve stood the test of time, even though some might not have been well-received upon first publication. How much does this weigh on us from the outset? Does the fact of it being classified as literary canon persuade us that we should like a book?Recently, I came across a novel called An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser in my local Borders. It had been a case of random selection, as I’d just been combing the ‘Fiction’ shelves to find something I might fancy. I’d never heard of it before nor of the author, but the title jumped out at me, the melancholy figure of the woman in the floating boat on the cover encouraged me, and the synopsis on the back ultimately convinced me to spend money on it. I suppose the appeal lay in the promise of something epic, something that might contain truths about America and her people at a certain époque of her history.An American Tragedy, set in the Roaring Twenties, is the story of Clyde Griffiths, born to poor parents - religious workers who ply the streets every day proselytizing their religious truths with all their children in tow. They are portrayed as desolate and unworldly, and it is clear even as he is dragged along with the entire entourage that Clyde simply wishes to be somewhere else. His parents have devoted their lives to their religion and have subordinated everything to it, including their children’s proper education, moving here and there in search of “a larger and better religious field in which to work”. Clyde is aware that the boys and girls he encounters look down on him and his family, that “the work his parents did was not satisfactory to others”, and it is this that sows the seeds of his discontent, and he determines to break away as soon as he is old enough, working as a bellhop at a Kansas City hotel where he is first introduced to the pleasures of sex and desire and what the rich (or almost-rich) do when they are at play.However, due to the accident of his birth to penniless and unproductive parents, Clyde has no knowledge, training or guidance that might enable him to pursue actively a better life. Instead, he flits aimlessly from one thing to another and has only vague dreams of success to sustain him, hoping that fortune might one day favour him and enable him to rise to the higher ranks of society. This fortune later comes in the guise of his wealthy uncle Samuel Griffiths who, with the inheritance bestowed upon him (from which Asa Griffiths, Clyde's father, was precluded owing to parental prejudice) and his own business acumen, opened a collar and shirt factory in Lycurgus, New York. Clyde meets his uncle by chance at a hotel in Chicago where Clyde works after he’d fled Kansas City due to a mishap that occurred there, and Samuel Griffiths, taken by the immaculate manners and appearance of his nephew (which Clyde had fostered in imitation of the upper classes) and the vague belief that Clyde might do better than his father given the opportunity, decides to offer him a job at his factory. Once at Lycurgus, his relatives regard him with some curiosity, but he is largely ignored by them socially as he is still regarded by them as a potential embarrassment. At the same time, Clyde does not feel free to socialize openly with people of a lower standing than his wealthy cousins for fear of alienating and embarrassing them. And so, feeling lonely and isolated, he drifts into a love affair with Roberta Alden, one of the female workers in the department he commands and a poor but determined young woman, and in doing so he violates the rule that there be no fraternization with female employees at the factory. As such, they are forced to keep their relationship a secret.There is little doubt that Clyde is genuinely enamoured by Roberta in the beginning, although it is implicit that he would never, because of his aspirations to higher society, marry her. Moreover, some time later, a family friend of his rich cousins takes a shine to him - the rich and beautiful Sondra Finchley, who is reluctantly fascinated by the handsome Clyde, and whom Clyde associates with all the beauty and fine things he wants in life but doesn't have. Sondra is spurred by her desire for petty revenge on Clyde’s cousin Gilbert Griffiths, the arrogant heir to the Griffith millions, who has previously slighted her - and so she schemes with her girlfriends to befriend Clyde and introduce him to society in order to spite Gilbert, who has never been in agreement with his father's decision to assist Clyde, and who resents the fact that Clyde looks so much like him, suggesting perhaps that the differences between the two young men stem primarily from the differing circumstances of their birth, not from any inherent talent or capabilities they might possess. Through Sondra, Clyde is quickly accepted into the upper-class younger set and slowly, Sondra too develops an infatuation for him, and it dawns on Clyde that everything he desires of this beautiful glittery world could actually, finally be his. And this is when things start to go horribly wrong, for at the same time that Clyde and Sondra are romancing each other, Roberta is pregnant and is pleading Clyde to marry her so as to avoid malignant aspersions being cast on her character. And this is where Dreiser employs the events based on an 1906 murder trial to tell the rest of his story.In his introduction to An American Tragedy, Richard Lingeman writes that:[Dreiser] collected in his researches, he later claimed (with some exaggeration), nearly a dozen examples of what he regarded as a peculiarly American crime. These were emblematic murders, not necessarily typical ones. Dreiser was seeking a kind of murder that served as a metaphor for an illness besetting American society. Such a murder, said Dreiser, involved an ambitious young man who murders a woman with whom he has a relationship and who stands in the way (often she is pregnant by him) of a more advantageous marriage to a rich woman with whom he has fallen in love. Such killers were motivated by the American dream of wealth and success; they were trying to rise to a higher social and economic level and thus, “really doing the kind of thing which Americans… would have said was the wise and moral thing for him to do had he not committed a murder,” Dreiser wrote.I won’t go into any further detail of this novel as it’s already pretty clear where it’s heading, except to say that despite the somewhat archaic quality of the writing I enjoyed reading it - I guess because it’s a “social” novel, commenting on such themes as the permutations of class distinctions, equality, status and social ambition, which are still relevant today... and because even though I already had a vague idea how the story was going to end I still found myself at various moments rooting for Clyde, hoping he would make the most of the opportunity his uncle had given him and prove his relatives and all of society wrong. More than once throughout this novel, you will recall with irony the oft-expounded maxim that “all men are created equal”, a premise which this novel clearly shows to be false... though it is not to say that where Clyde failed all others would too. What led to Clyde's downfall, essentially, was that he let his social ambition overwhelm his conscience.I might also note that I had no idea at the time I picked up An American Tragedy that it is supposed to be one of the most important American novels of the 20th century. And so I read it without any preconceptions, and enjoyed it all the better for that.Note: The Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York includes information on the real-life Chester Gillette (on which Clyde Griffith is based) murder case that inspired An American Tragedy, if you're interested.
An American Tragedy is twice as long as it needs to be and contains four times as many commas as any other book in existence. Its odd sentence structure suggests that it was run through Babelfish, translated into Dutch and then back into English. Here's a sample sentence:There are moments when in connection with the sensitively imaginative or morbidly anachronistic--the mentality assailed and the same not of any great strength and the problem confronting it of sufficient force and complexity--the reason not actually toppling from its throne, still totters or is warped or shaken--the mind befuddled to the extent that for the time being, at least, unreason or disorder and mistaken or erroneous counsel would appear to hold against all else.And that's just one sentence. The book is 814 pages long. It's not all like that, but enough of it like that that I was glad to get to the end. Still and all, it's a good book. Long and ungrammatical, but good.Clyde Griffiths is the son of impoverished street evangelists living in Kansas City in the early 1920s. When he is old enough to work, he gets a job as a bellhop in a good hotel and for the first time in his life has money, friends, and a girlfriend named Hortense who promises to "be nice" to him if he buys her a fur jacket. The drama of the jacket goes on for about a thousand chapters until one day Clyde and some of his friends, while riding in a stolen car, hit and kill a 9-year-old girl. Although not the driver of the car, Clyde flees from Kansas City, eventually landing in Chicago where he takes another hotel job and a couple of years later meets by chance his wealthy uncle Samuel Griffiths who owns a large shirt collar manufacturing firm in Lycurgus, a town in upstate New York. Clyde goes to work for his uncle's company, but being poor (and his cousin Gilbert taking an instant and irrational dislike to him) is otherwise ignored by the Griffiths who are at the top of Lycurgus society and consider him something of an embarrassment. Nor does Clyde have any other friends, as he fears that if he associates with people of his own social standing he'll be further alienated from the Griffiths, whose acceptance he desperately wants.Partly due to his loneliness (and partly due to being a 20-year-old man who had to leave town before he could buy his horrible girlfriend a fur jacket and have her be nice to him in return), he breaks a company rule and begins dating Roberta Alden, a young girl who left her family's struggling farm and now works for the Griffiths company under Clyde's direct supervision. Clyde believes himself to be in love with Roberta and she feels likewise; in short order, he convinces her to be nice to him, even though being a fairly religious girl, she feels that being nice is morally wrong. Soon after Clyde and Roberta begin their relationship, Sondra Finchley, a young and beautiful socialite friend of Clyde's cousin Bella, begins to pay attention to him and invites him to several social outings. Initially, she does this merely to spite Gilbert but she quickly finds herself in love with Clyde, who reciprocates her feelings and tries to break things off with Roberta, who as it turns out is pregnant. It's probably too late to say, "long story short, what happens is ..." but long story short, what happens is that failing to secure any way of terminating the pregnancy, Roberta insists that Clyde marry her, at least long enough so that the child will be legitimate after which time she will grant him a divorce. Clyde stalls for several months and several hundred pages, knowing that there's no way that he can marry Roberta but hold on to Sondra, his burgeoning place in Lycurgus society, and his job with the Griffiths company. After reading a newspaper article about an accident in which a young woman is drowned and the body of the man with her is never found, Clyde invites Roberta to go boating on a lake. And we are not even to page 500 yet. The remainder of the book concerns what happens on the lake and what happens after what happens on the lake. It's all quite painful, especially toward the end of the book where Dreiser has characters quoting long passages out of the Bible. I thought this book would never end.Based on a real criminal case from 1906, Dreiser used the story as a basis for one of his continuing themes, that of the illusory nature of the American Dream and the pointlessness of pursuing success. His first novel Sister Carrie handles this is a much more concise and syntactically standard fashion. Even so, An American Tragedy is a great book, but one that I will never re-read.
What do You think about An American Tragedy (2000)?
This is probably the longest really bad book that I've ever read. I gave up several times, and really can't say why I came back and ultimately persevered through it. I first gave up after this wonderful interior monologue passage:"Gee, life was tough. What a rough world it was anyhow. How queer things went!"Really? Gee! I might have come back to see if the writing could get any worse. And on that score, Dreiser did not disappoint. There's a literary atrocity on just about every page of this book. By the last third, Dreiser has basically done away with niceties, like subjects and verbs. The reductionism continues until we get passages like:"But, oh, no! Oh, no! Not himself -- not that -- not his day. Oh, no. A whole year must elapse before that could possibly happen -- or so Jephson had said. Maybe two. But, at that -- ! . . . in two years!!!"I wish I were exaggerating. Now, just imagine 900 pages of this. Much of it repetitious, and it getting worse and worse, sort of like Chinese water torture, but with exclamation points instead of drops of water.But what of the characters? They are mostly notable for their shallowness and general unlike-ability. In over 900 pages, you would think that Dreiser might take the time to let us get to know some of them. Rather, he presents us with the broadest of cut-outs. Being generous, I'd say that he was doing something akin to kabuki theatre, and leaving his characters as archetypes to make the story more general. But I'm not feeling generous. So, instead, I think Dreiser basically hated everyone he was writing about, and couldn't bother to really get inside them or to humanize them, because then we (and more importantly, he) might come to like them.As for the story: there's probably an OK short story here. Here it is. A guy leaves his evangelist family and goes off to make his fortune. He starts to work for his uncle, the owner of a factory. One rule of the factory is no relationships between supervisors and the female staff. He breaks the rule in secret. At the same time, he breaks into the local society and falls for a spoiled rich girl. He would like to abandon his factory worker girlfriend, but he knocked her up, and she could expose and ruin him. So he plots to kill her instead, and does kill her, though not exactly the way he intended. He is tried and executed.Is it a tragedy? I was taught that tragedies had a tragic hero who suffered from some fatal flaw. Hamlet and indecision, Macbeth and ambition, Othello and jealousy. Without their flaws, these were all great men. Clyde Griffith is a bundle of flaws, but without any heroic characteristics that I could discern, except perhaps that people thought he was good looking. But as for flaws: he's stupid, vain, ambitious, self-centered. deceitful, lacking in empathy, a bit greedy, and so forth. So, despite the title, I don't see this story as a tragedy at all. Except perhaps for this: if the uncle's factory had allowed for dating of the workers, Clyde would never have broken into society, and might have settled for a humdrum, boring life with Roberta.I've seen some people praise this for the candid look it takes at sex. But here's what I see. Two people have pre-marital sex, and they both die as a result of it. That's really forward thinking and candid. And even as far as that goes, Thomas Hardy covered this same territory much better. And then there's Anna Karinina. I've also seen praise for the expose of society and ambition. But this book was published the same year as The Great Gatsby, and Gatsby, and again there is no comparison. Clyde's problem is not that he is ambitious. He is a little ambitious, but he seems more passive that anything else when it comes to his ambition, and it's definitely not presented as the cause of his downfall. And yet, there must have been something compelling about this book. How else could I have willingly suffered through all 900 pages of it. I ask myself that, and if I were in a more generous mood, I might be able to come up with some reasons. But I'm not in a generous mood, and after so many pages of the writing getting worse and worse, I don't see any point in being charitable. Bad writing, bad story, bad characterization, bad social commentary. Bad, bad, bad! -- Bad!!!
—Duffy Pratt
I haven't finished reading it....However, I can't refrain from writing something about it.It is beautifully written and big to my satisfaction.I love the characters and the theme of the novel.Clyde Griffith's personality is admirable considering the fact that he has never acquired any formal education. He is cultivated and carries himself in an excellent mannner. However, this changes, as usually happens to people in that position, when he meets and mingles with other people in high society. He becomes cruel, unkind, inattentive and unsympathetic to the plight of Roberta, who is his girlfriend.This leads him to commit murder by drowning Roberta.Now, what leads him to commit the murder is as surprising as the murder. Is it the fear of the threat by Roberta to expose him and his actions to his friends and relatives? This can be a factor. Is it because he is no longer in love with Roberta and despises her to the extent of killing her? this can be a factor because ever since he started getting attention from the rich Sondra, Roberta's appearance and letters seemed to irritate him alot. Roberta, what a pity, is beautiful, loving and too trusting. She falls victim to Clyde's immature ambitions and ends up suffering. Not only suffering, but she looses her life in the end. She is potrayed as having strong religious convictions which blinds her from seeing Clyde in the way that he truly is. Even towards her death, she still loves Clyde and fails to pay attention to Clyde's hostility towards her. All she's concerned about is her marriage to Clyde and later acceptance and approval from her family who are strong Christians. Gilbert Griffith is cold, distant and jealous not to forget, egotistical.As for Sondra am yet to point out her true personality.Upon buying the book I first decided to see what other readers say about the book. I totally disagree with the readers who say that the book is big for nothing. The book potrays our society and especially at the stage of youth when all we are struggling to fit in and define ourselves. Some of us come out of it alright while others end up along the wayside like Clyde Griffith.
—Paul Gaya Ochieng Simeon Juma
This book sat on my shelf for 12 years because I defied my mother's advice: I judged a book by its cover. Literally. The cover of my copy of Theodore Dreiser's enormous, ambitious, sprawling epic An American Tragedy is singularly bland and uninformative. The back cover has a simple blurb telling me it is the story of the rise and fall of Clyde Griffiths. I sensed that this was another of those typically American, Gatsby-like novels in which the hero follows that great capitalist arc of rags-to-r
—Matt
