The closing chapters of the book, in which Hurstwood is ruined and then disgraced, are among the most powerful pages in a novel of merciless momentum, whose unsentimental depiction of big-city life sets it apart. The novel ends with Carrie changing her name to Carrie Madenda and becoming a star just as her estranged husband, George Hurstwood, gasses himself in rented lodgings. Henceforth, she becomes the victim of increasingly desperate relationships which, combined with a starstruck fascination with the stage, take her to New York and the life of a Broadway chorus girl. This is the first in a succession of Carrie's fruitless attempts to find happiness. En route, she meets a travelling salesman, Charles Drouet, who soon releases her from the drudgery of machine-work in the heartless city by making her his mistress.
The novel opens with Caroline – Sister Carrie – Meeber moving from the country to the city, taking the train to Chicago to realise her hopes for a better, more glamorous future. There's no question Dreiser paints an intensely detailed, compelling and closely observed portrait of urban America at the turn of the 20th century – a century in which the US would play such a decisive part. Saul Bellow, for instance, advised readers to take Sister Carrie at a gallop. He is no stylist, and yet the raw power of his narrative trumps the sometimes excruciating clunk of his prose. I will be the first to concede that Dreiser does not now look anything like their equal. Later, America's first Nobel laureate, Sinclair Lewis, said that Dreiser's powerful first novel "came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman". In some ways it's crude and heavy-handed, blazing with coarse indignation, but in its day it was, creatively speaking, a game-changer.
Sister Carrie is one of several novels in this series that address the American dream, and it does so in a radical spirit of naturalism that rejected the Victorian emphasis on morality.
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