Customer Reviews

Sister Carrie

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I just finished reading the book "Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser (1900). This book was a good, easy read and is strangely still current, even though it was written over a hundred years ago. With the economy the way it is it seems that not much has changed, except perhaps the value of money. Carrie's desire to be in the city, as well as her experiences with men who claim they love her are realistic, modern and honest. I recommend this book to people interested in realistic fiction and coming of age stories; also to people who like reading stories about the mid-west-- Carrie is from Wisconsin and moves to Chicago, then travels to New York City by way of Detroit.

This turned out to be a surprisingly powerful novel. It starts out as a tale of a "fallen woman," but ends up being the story of a broken man. Dreiser answers the question: what happens to a man who acts on his midlife crisis? Although the eponymous heroine is the catalyst for many events in the novel and the character through whom Dreiser explores the effects of materialistic culture upon the developing personality, this novel is really about George Hurstwood, a man who leaves behind his comfortable life, job and family and runs off with Carrie, a beautiful younger woman.

The novel is set in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Young Carrie Meeber is a Wisconsin country girl determined to start a new life who one day boards a train heading for Chicago. It is the first time she has ever left her small town. Carrie's personality is unformed. She is impressionable and easily swayed -- but ambitious. As a character, she is interesting mostly for the effects she produces on the various men she meets and for the way in which her personality is molded by the attitudes of those around her. Carrie quickly realizes that money is everything in the big city. Material possessions define the man or woman. Money determines social status. Money enhances beauty. A person who does not have the best clothes, a beautiful home, and the wherewithal to dine in the best restaurants and to visit the hottest nightspots is not really much of a person, Carrie concludes. This is one of the major themes running through the novel, the idea that our very essence is defined by others and how they perceive us (with the depressing corollary that others judge us based upon our income). The strongest, suavest, most self-confident personality may be broken down to nothing if deprived of wealth and its appurtenances. Conversely, money has the power to catapult a nonentity to the highest social echelons. There is one character, Bob Ames, who attempts to dispute this worldview. Bob is an intellectual who appears at intervals throughout the novel, each time telling Carrie that noble deeds are more important than money, that she should read Balzac and Hardy instead of trashy novels, that she needs to contribute something substantive to the world instead of falling for the meretricious charms of the high rollers. Yeah, whatever, Bob. Yawn. I think that Dreiser intended for Bob Ames to be a pivotal figure in the novel, a person of depth battling for Carrie's soul against the claims of the material world, but Bob's arguments are not very convincing in light of the story's bleak ending. Although Dreiser leaves open the possibility that Carrie will eventually embrace Bob's philosophy, it seems unlikely. Why should Carrie listen to Bob when everything with which she is surrounded exhorts her to favor superficial appearances over internal substance?

There are two brilliant portraits of men in this novel. Charles Drouet, a "genial egotist" and Carrie's first lover, is the spitting image of one of my ex-boyfriends. I suspect that most women have a Charles Drouet in their pasts because he's the type of man who holds great appeal at a certain time of life: the dashing, well-dressed, ridiculously self-confident ladies' man who is committed to nothing except his own pleasure, who genuinely likes women (on a shallow, self-serving level) and wounds them only inadvertently - that is, he does not maliciously seek to hurt anyone; he does so only as an unintended side effect of his self-absorption. The most masterful portrait, though, is that of George Hurstwood. The last third of the novel details his decline from wealth into seediness and finally into poverty, and it's some of the best writing I've encountered in a long time. (Drusier's style in the first two-thirds of the novel is bombastic - truly tedious at times -- but the last third more than makes up for it.) Anyone who has ever been unemployed for a long period of time will relate to the description of the lethargy and depression that sets in as Hurstwood's prospects grow dimmer, the self-doubt that takes hold and begins to emanate from his pores. I was on the edge of my seat during this part of the novel. It is SO GOOD. It is wrenching to see how Hurstwood's personality changes in response to his altered position in the world. When he is no longer accorded the respect that goes along with having money, he becomes a different man. Through Carrie's eyes - "the eyes of the world," Carrie being both a product of society and its standard bearer - we watch as he is transformed from someone worthy of respect into an object of contempt.

"Sister Carrie" was controversial when it first came out due to its profanity and sexual references, and it was released in numerous "edited versions." I read the Penguin "unexpurgated edition." It is disappointingly tame (for example, the sexual references are so oblique that I was unable to detect any of them), but I recommend the unexpurgated edition because other versions change the ending and cut out whole passages.

This is a great novel. I highly recommend it.