The Stoic by Theodore Dreiser

More railroads and romance with Frank Cowperwood, this time in London

Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Stoic, first published in 1947, is the third book in his Trilogy of Desire, preceded by The Financier and The Titan. Together, the three novels chart the life and career of Frank Algernon Cowperwood, a tycoon in the business of streetcars, subways, and urban railroads. In The Financier, Cowperwood built his career in Philadelphia. In The Titan, he suffered financial ruin and public disgrace through his unethical business practices. In The Stoic, Cowperwood has fled Chicago to find temporary solace in New York before deciding to venture to England and try monopolizing the London railways.

Although still married to his second wife Aileen, Cowperwood, now about 60, has commenced an affair with 20-year-old Berenice Fleming, whom he has groomed to be his mistress since he met her as a teenager. His relationship with Berenice is probably the closest he’s ever felt to love, but he wants to maintain his marriage to Aileen to keep up appearances, because scandal would hurt his business ventures. To keep Aileen occupied and to ease his philandering conscience, Frank clandestinely hires a boy toy to keep her company. While Aileen enjoys the young man’s attentions, she still has hopes of winning Frank’s heart back from the hated Berenice. This love triangle spends most of the novel shuttling back and forth from London to New York while Cowperwood schemes to keep the two women apart.

With books like Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and An American Tragedy, Dreiser earned a reputation as one of America’s great literary novelists, a virtuoso of sorts at crafting literature from real life. The characters of The Stoic, however, are hardly regular people, and their lives as written here often read more like soap opera than social realism. Cowperwood is not only a multi-millionaire but also a celebrity, in the way that William Randolph Hearst is depicted in Citizen Kane, or the way Donald Trump was famous before he entered politics. The fact that the characters are rich isn’t necessarily bad. The great French naturalist Emile Zola wrote several compelling novels about wealthy, high-society life, but luxury isn’t exactly Dreiser’s strong suit. On the one hand, you have Cowperwood’s railroad dealings, comprised of incredibly mundane discussions of financial and legal proceedings. On the other hand, you have his love life, which reads like some kind of sexless Danielle Steele potboiler. Most of the book feels somewhat like a repetitive rehashing of The Titan, except for the fact that in this book Frank and his ladies travel all over the globe. The novel does improve towards the end, however. The last several chapters take some unexpected turns, not so much plot twists but rather events and subject matter that make you think hmmm, I never would have expected Dreiser to write about that.

In addition to being Cowperwood’s final appearance, The Stoic was also Dreiser’s last book. He died while writing it. His wife Helen cobbled together his remaining notes into one final chapter, but the book was pretty much complete anyway and would have ended better without this posthumous addition. As a whole, Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire is an above-average work of American realism but hardly a masterpiece. An American Tragedy and Jennie Gerhardt are much better. If you’ve read those books and appreciate Dreiser’s brand of naturalism, however, then living through three volumes with Frank Cowperwood is not a bad way to spend one’s reading time.

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