The normal American novel, even in its most serious forms,
takes colour from the national cocksureness and superficiality. It runs
monotonously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile smugness and
hopefulness, a habit of reducing the unknowable to terms of the not
worth knowing. What it cannot explain away with ready formulae, as in
the later Winston Churchill, it snickers over as scarcely worth
explaining at all, as in the later Howells. Such a brave and tragic
book as "Ethan Frome" is so rare as to be almost singular, even with
Mrs. Wharton. There is, I daresay, not much market for that sort of
thing. In the arts, as in the concerns of everyday, the American seeks
escape from the insoluble by pretending that it is solved. A comfortable
phrase is what he craves beyond all things--and comfortable phrases are
surely not to be sought in Dreiser's stock.
I have heard argument that he is a follower of Frank Norris, and two or
three facts lend it a specious probability. "McTeague" was printed in
1899; "Sister Carrie" a year later. Moreover, Norris was the first to
see the merit of the latter book, and he fought a gallant fight, as
literary advisor to Doubleday, Page & Co.
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