Books: The Last of Dreiser

THE STOIC (310 pp.)—Theodore Dreiser—Doubleday ($3).

Among the thousands of words the late Theodore Dreiser left behind are the 134,000 that went into this novel, which his publishers say is to be the last. He never quite finished it, though he certainly worked long at it. The Stoic completes a trilogy he began in 1912 with The Financier, and continued in The Titan (1914). Like all Dreiser's novels, it is much chewed but badly digested: the product of his slow brooding on the injustices of life, clotted with unassimilated gobbets of ideas and massive lumps of earnest social purpose. The Stoic is...