I had never heard of An American Tragedy, or its author Theodore Dreiser, before I read it this past summer. I didn’t know what to expect other than that, in keeping with the theme of many of the other novels of this period (including ones I’ve read), I anticipated there to be an unsubtle moral theme and I assumed it took place around the 1920’s or so (just because our reading list is chronological, though my blog entries have not been).

I was mostly right, but it was a longer and more involved novel than I had expected, and ultimately, one that was less sympathetic to the protagonist than I’m used to from modern novels. It’s something that seems to be very common in older novels, whether Dickens or Lewis or whomever, this idea that — because the aim of the story is not only entertainment, but also moral instruction, or at least moral rumination — the protagonist is not necessarily ‘good’, and that we are acting more as a distant audience for whom the characters are living out their lives on a stage, and we applaud or jeer or nod our heads sagely depending on their actions. Modern novels want you emotionally invested in, and usually rooting for, the main character. They want you to identify with them, to want to wear a sweatshirt with their fictional sports team on it or declare yourself Team Your Fav’s Love Interest.

There’s hints of this in An American Tragedy — you could make yourself Team Roberta or Team Sondra, I suppose — but I don’t think anyone is likely to want to become a Clyde Griffiths stan. (I’m almost certainly wrong about this. There are Manson groupies, for heavens sake.)

Spoilers below, if such can be said for a hundred-year-old novel.

In any case, the book kicks off by introducing us to an impoverished religious family of six deep in the arms of the American midwest around the turn of the 20th century. The mother is a devout missionary and the father is a weak willed follower who tags along at her coattails. Clyde, who will become our main focus, is the second oldest of four children, two boys and two girls, who are dragged around from city to city participating in missionary work for which none of them feel any great passion.

Clyde is an ambitious young man who is dissatisfied with his parents’ lifestyle and dreams of making money and a name for himself. He gets a job at a soda fountain, and then at a hotel, and falls in with a fast crowd. In a bit of heavy-handed foreshadowing, his older sister runs away with a smooth-talker, gets married (or says she does), and then turns up home again, pregnant and disgraced. Clyde at first feels sorry for her, but also judges her for her poor decision making and weak will. In a similar bit of foreshadowing, he’s quite literally along for the ride when a girl gets killed by his friends’ reckless action, and he flees Kansas City to live in other cities under different names.

Fast forwarding a couple years, Clyde, by pure coincidence, runs into a rich uncle he’s heard of but never met at the hotel where he’s currently working, and convinces the uncle to take him on at the man’s factory in New York — his potential big break. Unfortunately, his uncle’s son, Gilbert, is resentful of Clyde and despises his poverty and overly fawning manner, and turns the family largely against him. Clyde’s uncle is not convinced by Gilbert’s arguments, but he is swayed enough to agree that Clyde must start at the bottom and work his way up, which then leaves Clyde living in a town where everyone knows his name and recognizes him (he and his cousin share a powerful resemblance) but where he is still poor, still unaccepted in society.

One of Clyde’s primary flaws as a person is that he is easily taken in by wealth and beauty, and in spite of having initially taken up with a Good Factory Girl (Roberta), he has his head turned by Sondra, one of the top belles of the town, who has a grudge against his cousin. Sondra thinks she’ll play a good game with Clyde to piss off Gilbert, who she doesn’t like, but ends up falling for Clyde, or at least, falling for the rebellion of being with him. It’s unclear to me how much she actually cares for Clyde himself, but she eggs him on, making him spend all his money and chase her, trying to keep up with her lifestyle and win her for good. (One of the bits of the book I liked the least was how Sondra talks to Clyde — it’s pure baby talk, of the ‘my ickle wittle baby boy’ genre, which I find extremely off-putting.)

Meanwhile, Roberta, our dear good religious farm girl who also works directly under Clyde at his uncle’s factory (what was the one rule, Clyde? Was it ‘no fraternizing with the girls you manage’? I think it was) falls pregnant, because of course she does. By the time she really fully realizes the reality of what’s happening, she’s also realized that Clyde is in the process of throwing her over for Sondra, and she ends up deciding that if Clyde can just help her ‘take care of this,’ then she will set him free, but if he can’t, then he has to marry her. This was an interesting bit of the book to me; I hadn’t realized there was any sort of legal abortion available at the time, and it sounds like it was only kind of available, but it was still more than I had expected. I know members of my own family had illegal abortions around this time period, and I had kind of figured it was either that or you went to see a woman about some herbs, but Clyde takes Roberta to see a doctor, and also buys several concoctions from pharmacies that are supposed to help. It’s still very under the table and hush-hush, and the doctor ends up refusing her, but still — it was more than I had thought was possible.

There are, in this story, no good characters. Sondra is a flibbertigibbet concerned only with her own beauty and wealth and thumbing her nose at her family and friends via Clyde. Roberta is a sniveling church mouse of a girl who lets Clyde convince her to do things she knows she shouldn’t do, but then is too paralyzed by her own disappointment and betrayal to deal with the consequences. Clyde’s relatives are too bound by custom and social concerns to do right by him; they transplant him to their town, but refuse to socialize with him or give him financial assistance, leaving him hardly better off at all. And Clyde is a gormless twit who can’t see past the end of his dick and the dollar in his hand.

Ultimately, inspired by a boating accident reported in the papers, Clyde plots to kill Roberta by drowning her on a ‘honeymoon’ trip. In a slight twist, while Roberta does drown, Clyde doesn’t push her in as planned; instead it’s kinda-sorta a legitimate accident, but he doesn’t help try to save her once she’s in the water, and he also then covers up what had happened, which, of course, he’d already planned to do. He gets caught very quickly, the trial goes immediately against him, and in the end, he is executed for her murder.

The novel was apparently based on several similar deaths at the time which were reported in the news, down to exactly replicating numerous details, to the point that I almost wonder if it would be more accurately called “creative non-fiction” or something like that. It’s very “inspired by a true story” energy, and it’s also definitely designed to warn the reader of the perils of too much focus on ambition and the sins of pleasure and greed. Really, if you follow the logical arguments, it’s almost a book warning America not to allow the poor to rise in society, because they won’t know how to handle themselves if they are permitted to move in different circles and hold wealth, which, well. That feels like an authentically American sentiment — tell the rich that it’s better for the souls of the poor to stay poor while at the same time telling the poor that they have a moral duty to stay in their lane.

Clyde’s mother is maybe the most interesting character in the book, though of course she is ultimately denied her prize, which is her son walking free. She’s smarter than everyone (not saying much, really), she’s genuine in her piety, and when he’s convicted, she does everything she can to raise money for an appeal and to get him freed.

Alas, the book ends with Clyde’s family, minus Clyde, out on the streets of San Francisco, preaching the gospel once again. With them, in Clyde’s place, is his elder sister’s son, doomed to the same life that Clyde had fled. And thus the cycle repeats once again.

It’s a good book, if you like the inevitability of a soap opera. The story is interesting, and I always enjoy reading period prose. That said, I did spend quite a bit of it wanting to beat Clyde around the head, so if you need a protagonist you can root for, this is not the book for you.