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Title: Powerful 1900 novel which will haunt readers in 2000
Review: This novel hooked me from the first page - who can forget the opening scene where the young Caroline Meeber is "spotted" by the travelling salesman Charles Drouet on the Chicago-bound train? We follow in this novel two seemingly irreversible life flows: Carrie uses her beauty and ambition to rise in life, and Hurstwood falls from his secure position of middle-aged, upper-middle-class success to utter failure, all for the love of a woman half his age. It's the stuff of melodrama to some, but not when handled by Dreiser, who takes the reader into a vividly realized urban world with well-drawn characters whose virtues and vices are equally on display. You leave the book feeling that Carrie and Hurtstwood could very easily have stepped out of the pages of today's newspapers, such is the zone of uncomfortable truth inhabited by the denizens of this brilliant novel.
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