D is for Detached Irony

What I read: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.

I chose Sister Carrie because I had the vague idea that I'd seen a William Wyler movie based on one of his novels. Wyler did in fact make a movie of Sister Carrie (no, not the one with the high school burning down), but I haven't seen it. I did see Dodsworth directed by Wyler (novel by Sinclair Lewis), so I was sort of right!

On the other hand, I was completely wrong about Sister Carrie's content, which I assumed was about a nun. In fact, Sister Carrie is rather like an Americanized Tess of the D'Urbervilles except that instead of being an angelic innocent who falls into trouble after trouble after trouble, Carrie is an amoral innocent who takes whatever comes along, trouble or not.

Sister Carrie is WAAAY more interesting than Tess.

Beyond having an innocent heroine, the novels also share a sense of inevitability or fate. However, in Hardy, this sense of fate is tied to God or the universe or something "out there" while in Dreiser, the fate of Carrie and her lovers is tied to their personal inability to act. They are quintessentially amoral beings who react to whatever is in front of them. Carrie doesn't choose to become one man's mistress and another man's bigamist wife and then dump them. She simply takes whatever presents itself. 

The road to hell isn't paved with good intentions; rather, the road to hell is paved with no intentions at all.

Like I said, WAAAY more interesting than Tess.

The tone of the novel actually reminded me more of restoration comedies than Hardy. The novel is very much a character study, and Dreiser goes out of his way to give us Carrie's mentality without much moralizing; however, a consistent acerbic tone underlies the prose. I used "detached irony" for the post title because I couldn't come up with a "D" word that meant "sardonic and cynical without being totally pessimistic; also rather droll but not really funny and just a tad moralistic." 

2023: I haven't read Dreiser since, but I still consider Sister Carrie one of the great classics, rather like Middlemarch, which I haven't reread since college. 

In the world of "it is TOO worth reading the classics--hey, I got that reference in pop culture," Detective Goren makes a reference to Sister Carrie in the episode where he confronts Nicole Wallace regarding her fake identity.