Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. It’s America’s Crime and Punishment.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. The characters of resentful, meanly self-absorbed Clyde, petulant Roberta, and (Clyde’s dream girl) vacuous socialite Sondra Finchley take on enormous solidity and presence as Dreiser’s patient explorations of what seem to be their every thought and deed nail the reader’s eye and mind to the page.

But it works sensationally as foreshadowing-and the payoff, especially in superbly dramatic trial scenes, is nothing short of monumental. The lengthy account of Clyde’s Kansas City boyhood (shaped by his impoverished parents’ dulling religiosity) exhibits all of Dreiser’s stylistic infelicities and monotonous redundancy.

The tragedy is an “American” one because of its central action: the drowning of pregnant Roberta Alden by her lover Clyde Griffiths (based on a real 1905 murder case), ensuing from the latter’s seduction by “the American dream” of rising from humble origins to wealth and social success. A new edition of Dreiser’s massive 1925 masterpiece, a thrillingly detailed social panorama onto which a vivid, sobering tale of ambition and murder and their consequences is painstakingly grafted.

An american tragedy by theodore dreiser