Friday, August 31, 2012

An American Tragedy

I am so glad to be done with Dreiser's An American Tragedy!

In spite of an over-written and plodding prose, this novel is very engaging for the first two thirds (about 600 pages I believe). Although I was familiar with the story and knew the ending, I was sucked into the conflicted and yearning mentality of the protagonist, Clyde, and was interested in the plot.

However, once the "main event" happens, the climax the narrative had been building up to, the book takes a serious downturn. There is an incredibly drawn out courtroom section which repeats, in great detail, all the events I had already read about. Towards the very, very end I found myself again interested, but really, a giant chunk of this book was a major drag.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

this means the george stevens movie--with elizabeth taylor, montgomery clift, shelley winters--was BETTER!

Diana said...

Totally