A book can be bad for many reasons: paucity of ideas; clumsy characters; psychological shallowness; bad writing; lumbering self importance; unjustifiable length. An American Tragedy combines all these features in a positively indecent display of literacy ineptitude.
The story is simple enough. Clyde Griffith, a young man from an impoverished background, attempts to improve his lot by attaching himself to a wealthy branch of his family. Initially successful, his dreams of social advancement are compromised when he gets a naive young girl, from an even less socially auspicious background, pregnant. Faced with the destruction of his hopes, he murders her. He is caught and brought to justice.
That is the story in a hundred words. Dreiser stretches the tale out to almost a thousand pages. He manages this feat by practising redundancy. This is a writer who never found an idea idea so banal or obvious that he didn't think it worthy of repeating at least three times. The novel, with this repetition cut out, would be significantly reduced in size. I'm not suggesting it would be improved: there is an abundance of other flaws to be addressed. But at least the ordeal would be reduced.
So, what can the reader who ignore my warnings expect? Sludge. Dresier writes in a style that combines of plodding prose with hysterical hyperbole, outlandish metaphors, and occasional descents into complete incomprehensibility. Here's a taster, from the crucial central section, where dim Clyde schemes the murder of bland Roberta:
Indeed the center or mentating section of his brain at this time might well have been compared to a sealed and silent hall in which alone and undisturbed, and that inspite of himself, he now sat on thinking the mystic or evil and terrifying desires or advice of some darker or primordial and unregenerate nature of his own, and with out the power to drive the same forth or himself to decamp, and yet also without the courage to act upon anything.Say what? Is it really necessary to specify that this brooding takes place in the "center or mentating section" of his brain? Why resort to the crudely anatomical "brain" at all? The whole first section could be reduced to "Clyde's mind might well have been compared ..." But no, even that's too redundant. "Might well have"? Don't shilly-shally, Theodore, might it or might it not? Assuming it might have, we now have "Clyde's mind was like a sealed and silent hall ..." But does it need to be "sealed and silent"? Let's just call it silent. In fact, let's forget the hall altogether. It's a clunky and cliched simile and, worst off all, pointless. It says, in effect, that Clyde's head was like a place where Clyde sat thinking. Now maybe I am just a Philistine, but I'm not convinced such a revelation merited such torturous phrasing, nor am I certain that this too-long novel would have been significantly weakened by excising the passage altogether.
Dreiser's genius is that he can produce sentences like that on almost every page. Here's another one:
And this, while not producing a happy reaction in her, had the unsaisfactory result of inducing in Clyde a lethargy based on more than anything else on the ever-haunting fear of inability to cope with this situation as well as the certainty of social exposure in case he did not which caused him, instead of struggling all the more desperately, to defer further immediate action.It is worth noting that this occurs on page 423-4, and the earlier quotation on page 483. After sixty pages, Dresier is still hammering home his point with a manic obssession that betrays either contempt for his readers, or a lack of confidence in his ability to create characters. Okay, Theo, Clyde's a procrastinator. We get it.
Dreiser is no one-trick pony, however. He can do all kinds of incompetence. He specialises in sentences that wander all over the place, from stale metaphors to bland insights to pointless comment, insufficient punctuation and absolutely no point. He can also be a useless writer in very few words at all:
Clyde's hair-roots tingled anticipatorily.Is it possible to imagine a five word sentence that combines more literary gaucheness and pretention? Not for Dreiser the common place 'in anticipation.' He must demonstrate his mastery of language with the clumsy, pretentious 'anticipatorily.' And the almost creepy precision of 'hair-roots.' What's that all about?
Dreiser also indulges his penchant for metaphors of the stalest and most trite type. Example has already been made, but, in the manner of Dreiser, I won't stop with one instance. Rarely has an author demonstrated such an enthusiasm for figurative language, with so little originality, or discernment:
But just the same, shameful as it was, here were the stark, bald headlands of fact, and at their base the thrashing, destroying waves of necessity.There are some metaphors that really, really don't deserve to be extended. And sometimes he just stops making sense altogether:
And so he was about to repeat his customary formula in such cases that all could be told to him without fear or hesitation, whatever it might be, when a secondary thought, based on Robert's charm and vigor, as well as her own thought waves attacking his cerebral receptive centers, caused him to think again."Her own thought waves attacking his cerebral receptive centers"? What are we to make of this pseudo-scientific balderdash? The whole book is a sustained exercise in bathos - Dreiser's attemtpts to wring us, move us, puzzle us, inflame us, suceed only in boring us, or providing us with occasional unintended amusement.
Well, beyond the writing itself, what else have we? A story that should have been idiot-proof. The sumary I gave above may have struck some as interesting. it is. But Dreiser is such an inadequate writer that whatever intrinic tension, pathos or interest in the tale is crushed by his ponderous style and his insistence on telling us everything at least three times, in progressively more awkward sentences. The characters are hopelessly two dimensional. Clyde is bland and unlikeable, and - as he is rapidly tracked down by the forces of the law - shown to be stupid as well. We find it hard to care for him because his passion for the superficial and silly Sondra Finchley is so unconvincing. Note, not misplaced - part of Dreiser's Big Idea is that Clyde sacrifices Roberta's true love for Fickle Sonra's fancy - but unconvincing. Similarly, we don't care overly much for the feeble Roberta. It might seem mean, but rarely has a damsel been so distressed without inspiring any pity in the reader, who can only long for the chilly waters of the fatal lake to close over her.
Now, in fairness, there is one bit - just one - where An American Tragedy generates a modicum of interest. This is during Clyde's trial. The trial is a gift to Dreiser, who can't resist his urge to reiterate what we've already read, and has various witnesses tell us things we already know. But the cross examination of Clyde by the bitter, angry district attorney, Mason, does generate some power. For once Dreiser's compulsion to leave nothing out is some sort of a virtue. Reproduced virtually verbatim, the cross examination runs to thirty two pages, and it is grueling read as Clyde is slowly broken down. It lacks tension, because Dreiser is such an idiot he tells us precisely about the fatal trap Mason sets, well before it is sprung, but the relentlessness of the cross examination stands at odds with the rest of the book. Just two men, one questioning, one answering, almost word for word, without the continual flat footed authorial showing off that ruin the other 824 pages.
Dreiser is a mediocre writer who attempted to tackle a big idea in a big way and came hopelessly undone. Unwittingly, he provided his own epitaph, describing the luckless Clyde as an "inadequate Atlas," trying to endure the weight of his troubles. Dreiser is a similar figure in a similar predicament - like Clyde, he is incapable of carrying off his project successfully, and to foolish to abandon it.
NO STARS
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