Ending Badly

I've been telling students for many years that Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) is one of the best American novels, up until the time Clyde is caught, then it goes into the toilet, more or less. A great book than goes down hill at the end. Recently, I looked at it again, to see if what I have thought for so long is true. AAT is divided into three books; book three is essentially a police procedural, and here Dreiser makes use of what was historic material, since a similar killing had taken place, along with a circus-like trial, a fixture of the era, some twenty years earlier, one that had "inspired" the book. So, part of the problem is that there's a lot of telling at the end, unlike the showing that had been going on earlier, such as the "murder" scene on the lake. In that way, the first two thirds of AAT is more a product of Dreiser's imagination, until reality takes over, since the actual murderer did not share Clyde's fictional background. The character of Clyde had been pulled out of Dreiser's own murky inner life. Dreiser has never been accused of being a stylist, so a difference in language is not the question; it is more a matter of Dreiser letting the public record interfere with his re-imagining. In any case, in the 1951 movie, A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens, Stevens spends hardly any time on the trial or Clyde's incarceration. There is an old Hollywood saw: "You take good books and make bad movies, and you take bad books and make good movies." A Place in the Sun is a wonderful movie, but it pushes only one part of Dreiser's novel. Stevens has Elizabeth Taylor come visit Clyde on death row, whereas, in the novel, no such meeting with Sondra, the rich girl, takes place, and when Clyde is marched off to the death chamber, Elizabeth Taylor's face is superimposed behind Montgomery Clift, and Clift's expression can only be read to mean that it is worth being executed in order to have dated Elizabeth Taylor, not the message that Dreiser wanted to convey. ATT, though, is a great novel, great enough to survive a bad ending in either medium.