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Book Corner – October 2018 (2)

Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser

I’m a great fan of these collections of the world’s greatest books that you can find to feed your Kindle for less than a pound. One that took my fancy was the grandiloquently titled One Hundred Eternal Masterpieces of Literature, although you actually need to buy both volumes to get the ton. As well as the usual suspects – I find it comforting to know that if I’m knocked down in the street, at least those who scoop me up will be impressed to see what I’m reading – the contents of your Kindle are the modern day clean pair of underpants, I feel – you can come across something that you might not otherwise have bothered with. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie falls into that category.

Published in 1900 by, according to Dreiser’s biographer, “a publisher who detested both the book and the author”, it met with mixed critical reaction and was condemned for its immorality and philosophy of despair. Others saw it is as the dawning of 20th century American literature, hailed by H L Mencken as capturing “the gross, glittering, excessively dynamic, infinitely grotesque, incredibly stupendous drama of American life.”

I found it a strangely compelling read, even though I found the main characters hard to empathise with and Dreiser’s prose unpolished and clunky, betraying his journalistic past. Perhaps Saul Bellow was right that it should be read at a gallop. But if you stick with it, you get a very powerful, closely observed picture of life in the booming Chicago of the late 1880s and early 1890s. This is not a story set in the refined salons inhabited by the upper classes a la Henry James. This is life in the raw and Dreiser paints a vivid picture of the drudgery, grind, hand to mouth existence that many who were chasing the American Dream had to endure.

Dreiser’s world vision is that essentially life is a Manichean struggle, leaving no room for any shade of grey. That this is the case is made pretty clear on the opening page; “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

The story tells of the rise of Carrie Meeber, the eighteen year old who leaves home to find her fortune, falls into the clutches of George Hurstwood, escapes and then makes her name as a theatrical star. But for all her riches, she is unfulfilled, her eyes having been opened to greater things by the slightly other worldly Mr Ames who told her that “riches were not everything; that there was great deal more in the world than she knew.

The counterweight to Carrie’s (eventual) rise is George Hurstwood’s decline into abject poverty and despair. I found his story much more compelling than Carrie’s and Deiser’s narrative shows the momentum of decline once poverty has you in its clutches. It was ever thus and will continue to be so. Deiser spares no details as he paints his picture of the desperation to find something to eat and somewhere to lay your head, an even more galling experience for someone who had previously been so proud and relatively well-off as George. His suicide is a merciful release.

Deiser’s rather priggish interjections can be a bit tiresome and his protagonists are not nuanced characters. But their rather black and white characteristics fit in with the tale he wants to tell and Deiser delivered what many consider to be America’s first naturalistic novel.

I’m glad I found it.



This post first appeared on Windowthroughtime | A Wry View Of Life For The World-weary, please read the originial post: here

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Book Corner – October 2018 (2)

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