Sister Carrie

Rating:
Summary: A decent novel with an uninteresting, foolish main character
Review: I don't think I got all the way through Sister Carrie, but I do recall thinking that Carrie is an amorphous idiot with no real voice of her own and no opinions. She is completely inexpressive, hence we never really get to know her -- to understand her motivations. Perhaps this is Dreiser's intention -- indeed, Carrie's lack of strength is likely the main reason for her downfall. I wouldn't know -- her character was so aggravating, with her wishy-washy, inarticulate ways, that the book did not make a truly lasting impression on me. Not bad, though, if you have more patience and more time than I did.

Rating:
Summary: BELOVED CLASSIC
Review: The bluntly written Dreiser novel of a fallen man and a rising woman. The cross off of these two characters are astonding, such a coincidence that is so hard to believe, yet quite possible. Bad decisions, and good moves affect your life and social standing greatly, just like AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, SISTER CARRIE is a book with great meaning, great literature.

Rating:
Summary: Rags into Riches? Possible for women with beauty & strength
Review: Theodore Drieser's unique and boldfaced novel of a country woman of beauty and her rise to fame in New York as a reknown broadway star.

Rating:
Summary: Emotional
Review: Because of love and greed, two people who meet by chance have drastically altered their paths in life, for better and for worse,

Rating:
Summary: POVERTY TO RICHES and vice versa
Review: A haunting realism novel, how one of poverty can rise high, while one of wealth can fall down to the bottom of social status. It amazed me how a poor girl could slowly, with the right people and timing, could become a broadway star. And how a man, who runs away with the poor girl, once wealthy of prestige and money, would fall down low enough to go and beg for money from her. The scariest part of this book was how he chose to end his life, after bad mistakes and dreams. The total American life, taking its toll on the ones that haven't been able to handle success.

Rating:
Summary: Not too good
Review: Maybe I missed something, but this dry book of the evils of materialism was really bad. I think Dreiser was trying to do too many things at once. Explaining the evils of consumerism, spontenaity, and dependence, yet to good of having enough, gall, and trust is simply too much for a writer who prefers to call everything meloncholy. And what's with the rocking chairs?

Rating:
Summary: Good story, bad writing!
Review: I have just finished reading Sister Carrie, and until the very last pages I was constantly trying to wipe the sleep out of my eyes! If there has ever been an overrated writer Dreiser is him! Constantly trying to add more details than are needed for a complete understanding of the characters' lives, Dreiser attempts to trap us in their minds--and that is not a place you will want to be. Instead of making us enjoy the characters and feel sorry for them, he makes us wish them to die suddenly on the next page! What an upset!

Rating:
Summary: Twist ending on classic formula
Review: One of the reasons why Sister Carrie is worth reading has to do with the ending. If you've read any of these famous home-wrecking novels, where a young beautiful girl gets involved with an older man, and wondered if suicide always had to be the answer, here's your book. But surprisingly, the ending makes you sort of long for the good old suicide ending. Sister Carrie isn't bad, but a lot of the insights into human nature and society are expressed in the language of a talk-show self-help psychiatrist rather than a great author. There are better versions of this formula (Updike, Tolstoy, Wharton, Austen) but there is still something in Sister Carrie that makes it worth reading. Despite its title, the better character depiction in the book belongs to the lover rather than the heroine of the title. Like Updike, Dreiser makes you feel for the plight of the upper-middle class white man. And I mean that seriously, with no sarcasm.

Rating:
Summary: A Groundbreaking Novel of Urban Social Realism
Review: Theodore Dreiser, more than any other novelist of the first half of the twentieth century,captured the brutish, corrupting power of large American cities, particularly Chicago, and most notably in Sister Carrie, based on the personal experiences of his older sister. Dreiser, like Stephen Crane whose body of work preceded Carrie by only a few years,was repelled but strangely drawn to the underbelly of large, impersonal urban centers beckoning young writers from the hinterland. In the case of Stephen Crane who consorted with the demimonde of New York's Lower East Side, and may in fact harbored desires of becoming one of the lost souls he portrayed, Dreiser observes the city with the dispassionate and clinically detached eye of a surgeon. He is interested in the social forces that compel man; Hurstwood's fumbling, faint-hearted attempt to remove money from his employer's safe only to have the safe door slam shut at the moment he begins to reconsider the consequences of his actions, suggests that man is powerless before the "larger forces" of nature which is a persistent theme found in Dreiser's best work. Sister Carrie and American Tragedy are representative novels of ambition, lust, greed,and envy in all its corrupting excess. The final scenes of Hurstwood shambling through the darkened streets of Manhattan during a raging blizzard, are among the most powerful and thought provoking images to be found in all of literature. A tour de force from one of America's greatest novelists, albeit one of its most politically Quixotic.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful 1900 novel which will haunt readers in 2000
Review: This novel hooked me from the first page - who can forget the opening scene where the young Caroline Meeber is "spotted" by the travelling salesman Charles Drouet on the Chicago-bound train? We follow in this novel two seemingly irreversible life flows: Carrie uses her beauty and ambition to rise in life, and Hurstwood falls from his secure position of middle-aged, upper-middle-class success to utter failure, all for the love of a woman half his age. It's the stuff of melodrama to some, but not when handled by Dreiser, who takes the reader into a vividly realized urban world with well-drawn characters whose virtues and vices are equally on display. You leave the book feeling that Carrie and Hurtstwood could very easily have stepped out of the pages of today's newspapers, such is the zone of uncomfortable truth inhabited by the denizens of this brilliant novel.