Dreiserama

As you read “The Bulwark” (Doubleday), Theodore Dreiser’s posthumous novel, you go through all the familiar experience of first groaning over the commonplace characters and the shoddy clichés of the style, then gradually finding yourself won by the candor and humanity of the author, then finally being moved by a powerful dramatic pathos which Dreiser has somehow built up.

­– Edmund Wilson, as found in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s

I don’t know The Bulwark, but that pretty much captures the Dreiser I have read.