Reading this required diligence on my part, attention and the willingness to grasp at new conceptions of the foundations of modern American culture. I have long come to accept the current consumerist bent of the nation as something of a continuum, but in Dreiser’s novel you can see its nascence, along with the death kicks of patriarchal solidity as the soft and bourgeois face the maw of rampant capitalism, as wells as the subsuming of feminine identity in a raft of blithering materialism. If such stuff is your proverbial thing, you might have a good time with it.

Not that Dreiser’s subject matter is shallow. The work is important. It’s a good filter to look through to understand where we came from and where we might be going. But it’s hard to take in the sense of the title character, who effectively doesn’t exist. Perhaps you’ll note that it isn’t until the last few pages of the novel that Dreiser, via the strange and archetypical academic Ames, describes even a single detail of her appearance. Don’t wait for her back story to unfold–it doesn’t. She is a selfhood-free waif tacking in the breezes of fatuous, sexless desire, shipwrecked far from her goals of meaningful prosperity.

I’ve heard this novel called one of the first modern works of American fiction. I can see that. I spent a lot of time scrutinizing details of life–relatively plentiful in Dreiser’s naturalistic style–noticing that the faces of Chicago and New York City were indeed changing. Sometimes you see gas lights, sometimes incandescent. Horses are starting to seem outmoded, streetcars more efficient. Women are starting to creep into the workforce. Money has become definitive (Dreiser will tell you how much nearly everything in the novel costs, to the penny).

What made this hard to read for me was the alternation between story and dialogue (easy enough) and long, introspective passages that caused me to refute the suggestion that naturalism never moralizes. Or perhaps I’m asserting my own expectations of moralization on top of what Dreiser is saying. In either case, it felt tiring. I felt compelled to skim occasionally, something to which I do not normally resort.

In the end, I felt like I was checking off a big to-do item: read foundational turn-of-the-century naturalistic novel. Check! ( )