Customer Reviews

Susan Lenox: Her Fall & Rise (Muckrakers Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I first encountered Susan Lenox as she was personified by Garbo in an enjoyable but rather unbelievable film that is a hash of melodrama and Hollywood "meet cute" conventions. As another reviewer has noted, there's virtually no correlation between the film and the book. Nontheless, when I saw an old copy of the novel in a used book store something told me I had to have it. My nudge was correct; Susan Lenox is a bang-up, amazingly gritty early 20th century novel (1908 or so) about an illegitimate child raised as a total innocent in the "lady class" but destined to become an astonishingly self-aware and highly intelligent New York City street prostitute after she is driven from her small town. She learns by hard experience that working women of her times could not make a living on their own without a supporting family. I could not believe at times that I was not reading a fast-moving historical novel written by a modern feminist author. I repeatedly closed the book to look at the back-cover photograph of the stern young Victorian era author in wonder. He is very hard on sexist men and has an uncanny bead on women's inner lives, outer lives, and--how odd!--their relations with clothing (yes, throughout the ages we females have suffered from fabric dependencies and have drawn inordinate satisfaction from satisfying them--but as the author DGP is aware, PEOPLE ONLY KNOW WHAT THEY SEE, so one's clothing can be tragically important, out of all proportion, as far as how one is treated). Follow Susan from her first arousing crush, to her horrid marital rape the day and evening of her family-forced wedding, to her sweatshop and tenement days,and through her graft-paying, opium-smoking, hard-drinking street prostitue years--and on to, surprise!, success. But the muck-raking author makes it clear 100 that times Susan's "rise" is a fluke and unfairly impossible without a sponsoring male. It is a gripping read--much more so than the books of the "canonical" realistic authors of the era. From other books of DGP I found on-line after reading Susan Lenox, I found he was starry-eyed about Karl Marx--but, hey, cut him a break since DGP was murdered in 1911 by someone who took offense at one of his books and therefore was spared seeing what a horror the Russian revolution and communism unleashed upon the globe. In his day, the grinding of the faces of the poor under mega-capitalists' feet (robber barons--remember them from US History 101?) and colluding politicians (Boss Tweed ring a bell?) made socialism (then just a theory) seem a kinder, gentler alternative to the status quo. Under DGP's proper Victorian waistcoat beat the heart of a dis-illusioned idealist who obviously cared about the plight of the poor and about the crippling social conditioning of women. And the gent could really turn out page-turners! Enjoy an unjustly lost classic.

I was indeed impressed with this lady's moxy and self reliance. However, I was somewhat disappointed in the book as a whole. There was enough movement in the first half of the book to keep me reading, but the over descript pros made me weary. After a while I began to simply skim over the pages trying to find content. The story was powerful, but could have been told in one-forth of the pages.

This was the most tedious story I've read in a very long while. I rarely begin a book and not finish it but after getting more than half way through this one I just couldn't continue. The story is bogged down in so much mindnumbing, repetitive detail, detail that adds nothing to the story except to make it unbelievably tiresome. The main character, Susan Lenox, makes the same ridiculous decisions over and over again with the same disastrous results. I found this story to be very unsatisfactory. I gave this story one star because I had no other choice, I couldn't give it no stars.

I read this book at least five years ago, if not longer, and the impression is still with me. We meet Susan as a young lady in a small, closed minded town in the "Western" state of Ohio, just past the turn of the century. (the last century.) She believes a young man that he has fallen in love with her and will run away with her to marry. This was viewed as a terrible scandal by the petty members of the community, "forcing" her guardians to find a farmer for her to marry; a dreadful creature. This is the beginning of her fall, and she falls and falls for some number of years following. She ecapes to a city- was in New York? and makes her way as a well brought up young woman forced to do so in a man's world. Men were essential to women for their livlihood, and a woman without reputation and introduction were cast adrift with dreadful housing, horrible food, terrible job prospects, if they can even be called a job. The gap between rich and poor was tremendous even then, and literally pennies were all that were needed to improve the lot of the "working poor", just as is the case now. The lot of the workers was easily improved, and it was tragic to see how callous the manufacturers were to the needs of their laborors.

Susan, luckily, "rises" but has a talent and ability to develop it that so few have. That she had the opportunity at all was mere chance.

I read this book at least five years ago, if not longer, and the impression is still with me. We meet Susan as a young lady in a small, closed minded town in the "Western" state of Ohio, just past the turn of the century. (the last century.) She believes a young man that he has fallen in love with her and will run away with her to marry. This was viewed as a terrible scandal by the petty members of the community, "forcing" her guardians to find a farmer for her to marry; a dreadful creature. This is the beginning of her fall, and she falls and falls for some number of years following. She ecapes to a city- was in New York? and makes her way as a well brought up young woman forced to do so in a man's world. Men were essential to women for their livlihood, and a woman without reputation and introduction were cast adrift with dreadful housing, horrible food, terrible job prospects, if they can even be called a job. The gap between rich and poor was tremendous even then, and literally pennies were all that were needed to improve the lot of the "working poor", just as is the case now. The lot of the workers was easily improved, and it was tragic to see how callous the manufacturers were to the needs of their laborors.

Susan, luckily, "rises" but has a talent and ability to develop it that so few have. That she had the opportunity at all was mere chance.

This lost classic is one of the great books of the turn of the century. Anything that could possibly happen to a woman at the turn of the century happens to Susan Lenox, so it's a panorama of the social conditions and mores of the period. I think it's a better book than Dreiser's SISTER CARRIE, but similar. It's a thousand-word page turner, written by a muckraking journalist-turned novelist with lots of axes to gring, and it's all fascinating. Twenty years after the book came out, MGM made a movie version of it with Greta Garbo, but the movie has virtually nothing to do with the book, and it's terrible (aside from Garbo, who is always interesting.) That's a particular shame, since the story of Susan had many parallels with Garbo's life, and a genuine adaptation might have been wonderful.