WARNING. LONG AND IRRELEVANT LITERARY DETOUR AHEAD. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.


Dreiser, and a post post-modern post from the literary sidelines.


Reading The Genius by Theodore Dreiser. Been meaning to for years, but never came upon it in the yard sale boxes and assorted used book bins from which I collect most of my reading matter. Fifteen or so years ago I went on a long Dreiser run with Jennie Gerhardt, Sister Carrie, The Financier, The Titan, An American Tragedy, and assorted non-fiction essays. The man was an American original in the sense that he told stories steeped in the particularly American economic and social realities of his time—and was doing so at a time when what is now considered particularly American was being shaped by human and technological forces at the height of their expansion and influence.

Dreiser is somewhat the forgotten 20th century great man of letters compared to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck (though he paved the way for them and broke much of the ground they traveled ) and more recently Bellow & Roth—and understandably so. His prose was tone-deaf compared to the poetic cadences of Fitzgerald, and his management of narrative flow was clumsy and overwrought. And he never wrote a scene that he didn’t then repeat at least three more times-- as if he didn’t trust that he had made his point the first (and second) time around.

But I find him irresistible and compelling despite it all.

Dreiser, for all his awkwardness and long-windedness, cares. And that makes all the difference in the world. He’s clearly struggling along with his characters. He’s working to understand them. He’s exploring all the possible avenues of explaining them to the reader and to himself. He’s going along for the adventure with you and letting his characters lead the way…wherever they may lead. You get the sense that Dreiser doesn’t really know any better than you do where the story will lead. And it's not because he's old school--writing like Dickens for popular consumption in serialized form--it's because he's really engaged in thinking through the issues as they develop in the story and allowing that thinking to influence his subsequent choices.

Dreiser is best known for An American Tragedy…which is sort of a tragedy in itself.
It’s the weakest of all the books I’ve read of his so far because it's the one that seems the most controlled and prefabricated. I’ve read that he was trying to write a best-seller with it and altered his approach to achieve that end—which he did.
The Genius, which I’m reading now (available like almost all other out of print and copyright expired books online through Guttenberg project and dozens of similar services) is typical Dreiser. Long, sloppy, repetitive, slow, stilted, and great. Great because the characters; who they are, what they want, and what they are going through to get where they want to go—trumps all other considerations. And Dreiser cares about them all. It’s a little like a huge thanksgiving dinner where the turkey is a little dry, the sweet potatoes aren’t that sweet, the wine is just ok, the gravy a bit too thick, the cranberry sauce too bitter, the vegetables are all over-cooked—but the family is all there, the old ones, the young ones, the loud ones, the quiet ones, the ones who would rather be elsewhere and the one’s who wouldn’t for the world be anywhere else…and it's all that varied humanity, with all their different appetites, needs, voices and spirits coming together that makes the meal memorable...and nourishing.