I just (finally) finished Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. I have been reading less the last couple months, but even so, this was a hard book for me to read. It is a heavy book, and not just because my copy came in at 800+ pages of small print, but Dreiser’s narrative style is as thick as it gets. The characters don’t just have thoughts and then act on them, they analyze every aspect of their decisions and only came to conclusions upon a huge amount of reflection. It wasn’t unheard of to read several pages just of a single character’s throughts on one idea. I’ve read several books written in the ’20s, but this was the first time that the book “felt” like it was written in the ’20s.
Not to say it is a bad book by any stretch. The main character is Clyde Griffiths, a poor young man raised by devoutly religious parents. His parents bounce from city to city, setting up missions along the way that never get anywhere, a lifestyle Clyde abhors until he is finally old enough to get his own job as a bellhop at a local hotel. He is immediately faced with a life very different from what he is accustomed, full of rich customers to impress, loose women, and flowing alcohol. He balances home and work precariously until a car accident, in which he was a passenger, kills a young girl. Fearing jail for his proximity to the disaster, Clyde flees to a new city, to “start over.”
In his fresh start, he runs into his uncle, Samuel Griffiths. Clyde knew his father had a rich brother who continued the family’s successful business (which Clyde’s father had absolved to pursue his religious life), but he had never known him. Samuel immediately sees the family resemblance, and offers Clyde a job at the factory, starting at the bottom but with the opportunity to work his way up. Clyde is welcomed by his uncle’s family, mostly as a curiosity, but is rejected by his cousin Gilbert. Despite the Griffiths’ implied instructions to live up to the standards of the family, Clyde almost immediately reverts to his previous life. He woos a young lady in his department, Roberta, and it isn’t long before she is pregnant. This comes just about the time Clyde was ready to leave her for the desires of a high society girl, Sondra.
Clyde is now faced with a conundrum. He wants nothing more to do with Roberta, but lacks the finances to get her an abortion (remember, this is the 1920’s), and all he wants is to live like the wealthy society to which he thinks he deservedly belongs. When Roberta gives Clyde the ultimatum of marry her or she goes public, he hatches upon the plan to lure her to a lake and drown her, so he can continue his new, fabulous lifestyle. His plan has many holes, and he is arrested shortly after and accused in her murder. A short trial finds him guilty, and despite his mother arriving to campaign for him, he receives the death penalty and is executed.
That pretty much is the whole book with all major events covered. So much of this novel is thoughts, ideas, and emotions explored. The author is definitey a scholar, but it makes for a challenging read. I do like that the book is more than just a surface read. Every time Clyde strays from his family and values to pursue a life he thinks he deserves, tragedy finds him. In the end, we still aren’t sure if he truly repents or if he continues to think that Roberta’s drowning was not entirely his fault (and neither is the final preacher who could have asked the governor for lenancy after interorgating Clyde). He skates off near-misses so many times that we think at the end he may just get away with it, and that would have been a tragedy indeed. He does finally get his just desserts, though it leaves his family in distress, thinking him truly innocent because he fails to admit his guilt to them. I knew there would be books like this in my quest to read my 100, and I’m glad I stuck through to the end, but I can’t recommend it for most readers out there.
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