Sister Carrie by Theodore DreiserMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
When we first meet Carrie (Meeber/Wheeler/Madenda), she isn't terribly likeable. There are shades of a Pretty Woman storyline, and the pace is rather slow. Stick with it--there's a lot here. The innocent Carrie, treated by the men in her life like an orphan without agency, quickly learns how to forge her own path, and this will include learning to play her own games. The story itself is quite miserly--definitely a tale of fortune's wheel. Dreiser has a gift for revealing the twists and turns of the darker bits of our souls, but in such a way that it is in fact part of our mundane existence, rather than dramatic depravity. The narration is exceedingly clever--sometimes sympathetic, sometimes sardonic commentary. The descriptions of city life and class structure are rich and dimensional and we come to feel a refreshing ambiguity about our heroine at the end.
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