Review: An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A most painful case, this Clyde Griffiths, and never exactly a hopeful figure as he grows up in urban poverty in early 1900s America. God will provide, repeat Clyde’s parents, more weakly by the day, and yet, the bellboys of the Kansas City hotels rarely come to good ends, we feel by end of book one. In that first act, Dreiser’s signature newspaper man’s style gives us the gritty feel of a street urchin’s world, with its overpriced department stores, smoky restaurants, and dank dancehalls. I could imagine a similar style serving China well, telling us something about a town like Shenzhen, and how it pushes and warps its denizens.

Book two is tortuous, though, a romance told by a naturalist, telling in excruciating detail how Clyde gets a chance to improve his station, how he risks it to pursue a girl, both victim to their bodies’ “chemisms”, how his background and circumstances poke and prod his thoughts, to passion and promises at first, then faithlessness and deceit later, and then, facing an unwanted pregnancy, to dark, chilling murder. There are forty seven chapters of plot here, drawn out deliberately to add moral ambiguity and continuing critical reflection on American life in all its constricting forces, its unfairness, its damage done.

Book three is almost as long, but this time takes us into the heteroglossia of the American courtroom, with its lawyers and newspapers, and towards the end, the mother and the chaplain who bring Clyde back to wrestle with the discourse of authority that started his journey, including the enigmatic analogies of the Bible: “Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?” The “mental and moral coward” is cruelly cast off.

As with Native Son, at the center of it all is the question of the possibility of free will. Just as Bigger Thomas’ murder of the white girl is the chance act that reveals all the underpinning forces of race on individuals, so Clyde’s killing of Roberta can be understood as something like a natural occurrence, later giving the lie to a hypocritical legal system that pretends to treat individuals equally, a monstrous falsehood as the lawyers deep down know. One thinks of Joseph K, and it seems no coincidence Kafka’s The Trial is from the same era, for many people must already have gotten the distinctly post-romantic sense of being pawns of human institutions run amok.

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