To be blunt, I am not quite sure I liked this novel. It took me two checkouts from the library separated by a few weeks to get through the book. I did get sucked into the narrative at the latter half of the book. Having said that, this is also a novel that if you can get through it, it sticks in your mind.
The best way I can come up with to describe this book is Theodore Dreiser riffing on Dostoyevsky’s psychological drama in Crime and Punishment with the second half of the book a courtroom drama.
My problem with the book is threefold. First, Dreiser is a very wordy author. If I had not known better I would have thought it was a serialized work with the author getting paid by the word. Think Dickens and others writing serialized novels in England in the 1800s. Part of the reason for the lengthiness of the book is that Dreiser spends so much time developing the psychological profile of Clyde. He also does this to a lesser degree with the supporting cast of characters.
My second problem with the novel was the lack of a moral center of the main character, Clyde Griffiths. While this is the point of the character, I found it extremely tiresome. I generally like a protagonist that I can relate to in some way. Clyde seems to be a leaf buffeted by whatever wind blows his way. He is all too willing to forgo doing the right thing in order to meet whatever internal need he is currently feeling. Only at the end did Clyde exhibit any degree of self-examination, and only then because the electric chair was so proximate.
My third issue was that not only was Clyde lacking as a person, but practically every other person in the book was also. Perhaps the only person that I would truly call decent was Clyde’s uncle, Samuel Griffiths, who gives Clyde a position in his shirt collar factory. And at least part of that was due to the sense of guilt Samuel Griffiths felt over his father’s treatment of his brother Asa.
The other decent character is Roberta Alden. She is a pretty young women working in Clyde’s department that Clyde has an affair with (against company policy). While engaging in what was at the time immoral behavior, pre-marital sex, she has her heart in the right place. It is her pregnancy that sparks the drama of the second half of the novel.
Most of the other women in the book are shallow and scheming. They are mainly interested in a good time or what Clyde can buy them. Later in the book there is Sondra Finchley who thought herself in love with Clyde, but would have probably eventually threw him over at the insistence of her parents.
His mother and father, while moral, that morality grew from an overzealous religiosity. This over religiosity and their poverty (from it?) Dreiser puts forward as a strong shaper of Clyde’s character.
There are two lawyers, Alvin Belknap and Ruepen Jephson, who concocted an ill-fated defense based on lies. The truth would not have kept Clyde out of jail, but it might have kept him out of the electric chair.
There is the Reverend Duncan McMillan an un-ordained minister, who at the urging of Clyde’s mother, visits him in prison. He becomes Clyde’s spiritual guide back to Christianity. However, towards the end when he could have possibly saved Clyde from electrocution he chose to remain silent. Again if the truth of Clyde’s action had been revealed it might have prevented the execution.
The basic story is this. A young man, Clyde, is brought up by poor street evangelists. He yearns for a different, better life. As a teenager he lands a relatively well paying job as a bellhop in Kansas City’s nicest hotel. Like many young men, the good money leads him to a decadent life style. My first real distaste for Clyde developed when he refuses to help his abandoned, pregnant sister so he can buy a demanding girlfriend an overpriced coat.
While partying with his bellhop friends in a “borrowed” car, there is an accident and a young girl is killed. Clyde shows his colors and flees Kansas City. He drifts for several years. Eventually he goes back to bell hopping, accidentally runs into his uncle, Samuel Griffiths. His uncle gives him a job in his shirt collar factory… remember those!
Clyde rocks along dreaming of joining the high society enjoyed by his uncle’s family, but more or less excluded by his poverty and other factors. Clyde begins an affair with one of his subordinates, Roberta Alden, which is very much against company policy. This causes them to keep it very secret. Roberta is essentially a good, moral person, but she does allow Clyde to pressure her into a sexual relationship, something considered very immoral in the early part of the 20th century. Things rock along and she becomes pregnant. This was almost a foregone conclusion as both she and Clyde were very ignorant in regards to human sexuality and especially birth control.
Unfortunately for Roberta, a little before she discovers she is pregnant, Clyde does begin a romance with a society girl, Sondra Finchley. Sondra has the good sense to not become intimate with Clyde. Sondra’s parents are working to stop Sondra from seeing Clyde as he is so poor and “not their type”. Of course, Clyde sees in Sondra the fulfillment of all his social climbing dreams.
So now we have the central conflict. Clyde seeing two women, one of whom he has impregnated. Clyde is trying to dump Roberta so he can be with Sondra, but he first needs to terminate her pregnancy. Failing that he decides to terminate her after reading about a drowning incident of a man and woman on a lake. He decides to mimic this accident. At the last minute he loses his nerve, but then Roberta is accidentally dumped in the lake. Whether Clyde could have saved her can be debated, but he made no real effort. He then flees the lake and the drowning.
Clyde is predictability caught and charged with the murder of Roberta. He stonewalls, and continues to stonewall. The lawyers that his uncle hires, plot a less than successful legal strategy based on lies. Clyde ends up on death row.
His mother finds a way to come east to Clyde and attempts to raise money for his appeal, only somewhat successful. She has to go back west due the illness of Clyde’s father. She has, however, put Clyde and the Rev. McMillan together. McMillan’s goal is to save Clyde’s soul. Clyde does confess the truth to McMillan. McMillan could have used this information with the Governor of New York for a possible stay on Clyde’s execution, but for all the wrong reasons chose not to. This haunts the Reverend, and Clyde goes to the electric chair.
The last scene of the book is Clyde’s mother repeating the pattern of Clyde with a young grandson.
Dreiser was opposed to the death penalty, and he brings out the horror felt by prisoners on death row. Also Dreiser is not a big fan of religion. It was religion in many ways that set Clyde on the wrong path. When religion could have saved Clyde, it ignored the physical Clyde for whatever soul he might have.
This was not an upbeat novel, and leaves one with a feeling humanity could be much, much better. Which is true. Perhaps Dreiser is working to move us there by pointing out our follies.
Available at Amazon and other retailers as well as your local library.
Film adapations
- An American Tragedy (1931) – Stars Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney, Frances Dee
- A Place in The Sun (1951) – Stars Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters. The movie won 6 Oscars and had 3 other nominations. It also won a bucket full of other awards.