You know what? Life is too short for this sort of thing. Three stars because there's a lot that's technically admirable, excellent even, about The USA Trilogy but nothing here justifies the ridiculous length or excuses the seething bitterness that runs through it.

Having ploughed through the 'Daughter' section and seen that it added nothing to the book that hadn't already been covered in the 'Janey' and 'Eveline' sections, I realised that even if I finished Nineteen Nineteen it would take a jail sentence for me to move the rest of the book back to the top of my reading list. All the characters and narratives are flat, existing only to illustrate a limp 'class struggle' point, and the female characters are particularly poorly served. Even accepting that it's legit for a book to be straightforwardly didactic, it's never going to be necessary to include three separate 'flighty gel has her head turned by the big city' strands. Maybe the remaining 600 pages were pure gold, but of what I read, the same material could have been better covered over maybe a third of the length.

The politics of the book are brash hard-left class struggle stuff, animated by a showy dislike of socio-economic 'elites', but shot through with contemptuous stereotyping of the 'little guys' it supposedly champions. The treatment of women is particularly awful. Every conceivable misogynistic stereotype is on display here. At one end of town you have the 'hard boiled older woman marrying the hero so he can take responsibility for another man's baby', and the 'gimlet eyed ice maiden living off her enraptured patrons', at the other end you have rich girls 'going a bit wild' and fully deserving the trouble they get themselves into. The resentment practically seeps out of the pages. Apparently later in his life John Dos Passos moved away from Left-with-a-capital-L politics and became a Goldwater-style conservative. It must have felt like coming home.

A bit trying in the middle, but on the whole, a damned impressive, panoramic novel.

Many writers get lost in trying to tell a great American story, USA is a triumphant anthology of tales that delivers both on the grand scope of life stories but also with reverence for the everyday flotsam.

History, satire, a collection of characters from across country and classes intersecting in a trilogy of novels that brings to life the language and energy of early 20th century America. Dos Passos is a technician in how he paces and breaks narrative, collages headlines and streaming conscious, profiles the celebrities of the age; on the small scale his tendency to combine words (“apartmenthouses” “expresstrains” “wornout”) give both an urgency to the writing and a new relationship between the clustered terms –his prose poetic with its care for individual words, page layout, ever careful punctuation, and superb enjambments.

More modern than you'd expect, it's surprising (and not surprising) to me that Dos Passos isn't taught alongside his contemporaries Hemingway and Fitzgerald when we're taught the American canon.

Covering the first 20 or so years of the 20th century, we see America begin to pay the price of becoming an industrial, cultural, and economic superpower. This is accomplished through the stylistically daring mashup of elements: the loosely interwoven stories of six - eight main characters; impressionistic biographic snapshots of politicians, inventors, financiers and other notables; and pastiches of headlines, song snatches, advertising ephemera, and news stories Dos Passos calls "Newsreels." The whole of it works together in a way that sort of reminds me of the swirling dervish style that endeared David Foster Wallace to so many.

Together, over the course of 3 books totalling 1200 pages, we're swept up in the dizzy pace of America emerging from the morass of war at the same time that untold new wealth is being created on the backs of immigrants and the poor. With the Versailles Treaty, Europe as we know it today is born. Labor begins to find its feet only to be knocked off of them by The Interests. Hollywood begins making and killing stars.

On the downside, because of the size of scope that Dos Passos has taken on, some sections drag. Thgere are times where some characters' monologueing on Labor reminds the reader of some of Upton Sinclair's more purple passages. And at times, the reader (and couples working on conceiving) may wonder how it is that literally any couple that drinks then has sex immediately becomes pregnant the first time every time.

It's a big sprawling mess of a book that could well become a repeated read for me.

NOTE: If you're considering this book, make sure you find this or another edition with "the original Reginald Marsh Illustrations." Marsh's scrawling line sketches are the perfect match for the energy and tempo of the trilogy.

I wavered between 2 and 3 stars for this one. *edit* Initially I decided upon 2 stars but after rethinking I’m adding another. I’ve always known what I liked about the trilogy so I’m not revising my “on the plus side.” It’s been harder for me to grasp what I disliked so I’m altering that final paragraph.

On the plus side- Dos Passos uses some pretty innovative writing techniques. I especially liked the Newsreel segments of the novels which gave fragments of headlines, newspaper stories, and popular songs from the 19 teens and 20s. These really gave a flavor of the National mindset during this time.

However, on the negative side is a crushing cynicism about the American dream and efforts to improve life for the have nots. 1500 pages of cynicism over the course of the trilogy is a LOT of cynicism. *edit* The narrative sections of the novels follow characters who live in the moment, show a slice of American society, leave a taste of extravagance and wastefulness. Rather than feeling the massive sweep that other readers seem to feel, I came to feel that we were offered the same moment, same slice, same drunken wastefulness repetitively. I never felt the successive books of the trilogy were building upon each other or building toward a deeper understanding. Possibly, I’m just not able to enjoy a story where I can’t conceive a trajectory. Mary French was the only character who felt different, felt more relatable, and it is in one of her narratives, late in the third book that I found one quote which hinted at the tissue holding all this together.
It’ll all end in blindness and sudden death. But who cares? Who in hell cares....? Who on the bloody louseinfested globe gives one small microscopic vestigial hoot?

141st book of 2020.



The U.S.A. Trilogy is comprised of three novels: The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936); Passos wanted the novels to be sold and read as one, so in honour of that, I found a beautiful old copy (from 1937) of the trilogy as one from Everyman Library and began—its total was 1449 pages.

Narrative Mass

Its construction is originally what interested me the most on starting. There are four narrative modes throughout all three books and the chapters shift between them.

Fiction: There are 12 “main” characters throughout the three novels and each have their own chapters, which begin from their childhood and through their lives chronologically. In the first book for example, Eleanor Stoddard has her own chapters appearing, but in the second book, her chapters are gone in the place of Eveline Hutchins, who was a friend and side-character of Stoddard’s. In this way, Stoddard remains in the story, but Passos starts us from Hutchins’ childhood before returning to the present and meeting Stoddard again. Almost all of the characters appear in more than one novel, apart from, I believe, Mac, whose chapters take up the first 100 pages of the first novel, but then he does not appear in subsequent books. All the fiction is written in true free indirect speech style.

“The Camera Eye”: These are usually small intermittent chapters that break up the large fiction parts (along with the later explained “Newsreels” and more rarely, the Biographies). Compared to the style of the Fiction mode, “The Camera Eye” is written in stream of consciousness and sometimes the prose breaks onto new lines for no immediate reason, giving the chapters the look of prose-poetry. These chapters are autobiographical (to be technical, they are a Künstlerroman—a narrative about the growth of an artist); they track Passos life from a child to a writer. The stream of consciousness makes them sometimes unclear, but they are an interesting change of style.



The “Newsreels”: These are perhaps the most strikingly interesting and different chapters of the novel that set it apart: the chapters consist of snippets from newspapers, headlines, song lyrics and other fragments, all from papers of the time, gathered by Passos. The main two papers he sourced them from were the Chicago Tribune and The New York World. The “Newsreels” are one of the main reasons for the Polaroid of the time that Passos creates and one of the features that lends the novel, I believe, into being the great American classic of the 20th century.

Biographies: The least occurring chapters are the short (short for covering a whole life, but considerably longer than the previous two modes) biographies. They appear only several times per novel and cover figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Isadora Duncan, Henry Ford and Thorstein Veblen.

This rather sporadic, manic experimental style drives the novel (U.S.A. is called a “novel”, despite being three novels). It influenced many writers, most notably, Jean-Paul Sartre.

The Pilot Fish

To sum the feel of the novel up I would combine Hemingway’s lost generation in The Sun Also Rises with the style and feel of Kerouac novels. U.S.A. is, in a way, plotless, for all of its 1449 pages. Characters drift, fall in and out of love, try to get work, travel, fall into doomed love again, get injured, go to War, and come home again. They are the lost generation that Hemingway was also writing about. And Passos and Hemingway were friends, often they are credited as “The Boxer and The Professor”—they met in WWI, both driving ambulances. (Though their friendship eventually declined and Passos was named “the pilot fish” in Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast—which is apparently derogatory.) Though they met briefly in Italy in 1918, they solidified that friendship in Paris, in 1923. Both writers were born in Chicago and both writers would end up being two of the greatest names in American fiction. Passos even married Hemingway’s old “high school crush”. They left one another at a train platform in 1937, no longer friends, after differing opinions, mostly from the Spanish Civil War: Passos, by that time, was being disillusioned with communism and the left-wing side.


Left: Hemingway, Right: Passos.

Huckleberry Finn to Fainy McCreary?

But where does U.S.A. stand in American fiction now? I would say that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the American classic of the 19th century, possibly with Moby-Dick or, the Whale fairly close behind. I have a Huckleberry Finn review (here), so don’t need to delve into why I believe that; the question is, why is U.S.A. the staple for the 20th century? The Great Gatsby is a brilliant American novel, and that aside, it’s almost a perfect novel; but where Gatsby captures America in the 20s, it is also only a Polaroid. Passos’ trilogy is more like a film reel. Of course, the trilogy is a doorstop compared to the size of The Great Gatsby, but Passos’ words and reflections, to me, echo further than Fitzgerald’s. I have already likened Passos to Kerouac. Thirty years later Kerouac was writing in the way Passos had before him; his characters (I use that term loosely, as Kerouac’s “characters” were all real people) tackled the same problems as Passos’: they drifted, they travelled, they had doomed love affairs. America was torn by war, money, disillusionment. Passos’ lost characters captures it all as The Sun Also Rises does, but with less bullfighting.

Autobiographical Interlude

I am English, and have been to America just once, in 2014, with my family; I was 17. We toured California for two-weeks, staying in nine (or so) different hotels and motels throughout the state: Los Angeles, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Yosemite, San Francisco, Monterey, and more. I remember a fair amount of the journey but what I remember most is being tired. My brother and I fell asleep frequently in the car and woke up to rolling palm trees, hills, mountains, cities. Every few days we were sleeping in a different bed, sightseeing more, walking miles and miles per week. I remember the giant stuffed heads in our motel in Yosemite in the mountains and the giant layered trees around the hotel, the whales off Route 1 booming out to sea, their tails throwing mountains of seawater into the air, and the raccoons we watched by the restaurants in Monterey, the seals, the waterfalls, the food and the sun.


Yosemite, 2014, Photo by Me.

So, when I read U.S.A. and there was this constant, ever-growing sense of movement, it only reminded me of my own experiences of America (because that’s all I really have): the tired feet, the heat, the motels and the haggardness. And like Kerouac’s prose, Passos’ rolls with such energy: in a single page a character can be married and divorced, years can flash past, the whole war can flash past, they can travel to Mexico and back, they can lose the love of their life, a family member can die, they can change their whole perception of the universe: in a single page one has to remain with full attention so not to miss it, in the same way my parents would call to the back of our car, “Don’t fall asleep, boys, you’ll miss it”—so we opened our eyes again, to gulp down more of America, before inevitably falling asleep again.

This is historical fiction to us but was reality in all its complexity when it was written. A big time commitment to read, sweeping in scope. There are lots of better reviews. Here is one of the 'News Reels' that separate sections of narrative.

GREEKS IN BATTLE FLEE BEFORE COPS

Passengers in Sleeping Car Aroused At point of Gun

Flow, river, flow
Down to the sea
Bright stream bring my loved one
Home to me

FIGHTING AT TORREON

at the end of the last campaign, writes Champ Clark, Missouri's brilliant Congressman, I had about collapsed from overwork, nervous tension, loss of sleep and appetite and constant speaking, but three bottles of Electric Bitters mad em allright.

Roosevelt Is Made Leader Of New Party

BRYAN'S THROAT CUT BY CLARK;
AIDS PARKER

True, dear one, true
I'm trying hard to be
But hear me say
It's a very very long long way
From the banks of the Seine

the crime for which Richardson was sentenced to die in the electric chair was the confessed murder of his former sweetheart 19 year old Avis Linnel of Hyannis a pupil in the New England Conservatory of Music at Boston.

The girl stood in the way of the minister;s marriage to a society girl and heiress of Brookline both through an engagement that still existed between the two and because of a condition in which Miss Linnell found herself.

The girl was deceived into taking a poison giver her by Richardson which she
believed would remedy that condition and died in her room at the Young Women's
Christian Association.

On the historical information covered, I was surprised by the amount of activity of socialists, communists, and the labor movement. They may have been emphasized because of Dos Passos private philosophy. Also this was a time of great wealth inequality and there were many people in desperate conditions before the Great Depression even began.

The first part of the wondrous Trilogy U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, one of the 100 Best Novels, according to The Modern Library and many others https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100...
10 out of 10


The 42nd Parallel is an impressive, overwhelming, acclaimed, exhaustive, modern, and somehow traditional for the under signed novel…he had tried to read it more than ten years ago, just as he was going through the lists of the best books – the prestigious ones, not something you find scribbled on a wall, the ones from TIME, The Modern Library, The Norwegian Book Club – but the juxtaposition of newspaper headlines, stories concerning a large group of characters and the daunting task of going through about twelve hundred pages, especially the last aspect have been too much to continue beyond the first few chapters…on the one hand, this has been a monumental Magnum opus that could have been taken in a decade ago – but then why not enjoy it now and in the following…next years, when the rest of the eight hundred or more pages are to ne turned – and on the other hand, there has been the misfire of The Tropic of Cancer http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/06/b...

John Dos Passos has been a leftist and that is another issue to consider for yours truly, who is more than intolerant of the left, especially the extreme left, seeing as he still sees the ‘glory of communism’ in his land, which had been ruled by commmies for decades – alas, on some levels, in terms of administration, mentality, corruption, the effects are still there, together with human relics of that past – and they still have too much power –when they should have none – and have many positions of authority as the Red Plague, the very good name that somebody found for the descendants of the commies…
As in the joke we know here, John Dos Passos has had a change of heart and ideals, after taking part in conflicts in Europe, serving alongside Hemingway and others – incidentally, in the comprehensive, excellent introduction, we find that of the elite that got together in Europe, John Dos Passos had been the least expected to create such a chef d’oeuvre, ostensibly because he was also more modest, less extravagant in his manner, if I dig this part right – and he has become a conservative, after being a radical as a young man…’if one is not a commie when young, one has no heart, if one is still a commie when old, one has no brains’ went one of the many jokes about this ‘wondrous system’ which we had had here.

Indeed, from the first part of the USA Trilogy, we are mesmerized by the scope of the masterpiece, which takes readers to The war in the Philippines, Mexico – John Dos Passos has visited and the brilliant introduction tells us that he has been impressed there by the Diego Rivera murals – from one coast to the other, following a variety of characters that we sympathize with…evidently, they often have to face, fight personages that we find loathsome, such as the man who tries to take advantage of Janey Williams…

He claims to be more than interested in her, indeed, he says ‘why, Janey, I may be in love with you’ and some kind of a goddamn declaration it is, just because they had been going out together, she had had the patience to listen to his speechifying, but then the fellow is interested in one thing…well, it may not be exactly a compulsive sexual attraction, with the exception of everything else, but the way he misbehaves, becomes ghastly shows that the meals and the compliments were meant to lead to one goal…
When they are in the car, he mentions that they should marry – saying something like ‘if you want to Janey’ – but it is more something that the future might bring, he is now focused on getting her to accept his advances, as he proposes they move into the backseat and he would say anything that would grant him her surrender…he wants to have sex and she is confused, dizzy and dazzled by what is going on, until she wakes up, hits him as he is almost raping her and then the cards are on the table…he shows who he is, by complaining that there ‘are no women in this god forsaken place that understand a man like him’ – something along these lines – and he will get that from any n***** for a few dollars

The 42nd Parallel has been published in 1930 and we know what an age that was in America – actually they have just sentenced the infamous Dereck Chauvin to 22 years for the killing of George Floyd, a racial horror that has ignited protests in the USA and elsewhere, against what seems to be a continuing racism in the States and around the world – and the use of the n* word is frequent, though there are some case which show the personages that are racist in a very negative light…the last part (of the first part ha-ha) of the 42nd Parallel is glorious – just like all the other tales, they seem to be a compilation – no, we need to change that to they are, not they seem – of enticing, captivating narratives, like a collection of compelling short stories, that sometimes meet each other – and there is a doctor there.
The doctor had been acting in a kind manner towards Charley Anderson - the latter is the central figure of the chapter US at war, which ostensibly will make the transition to the Second Part of USA, 1919, as far as we can tell without having read beyond the 42nd Parallel – Charley had been travelling for thousands of miles, working whenever he could find a job, but eventually he is left without anything, expect for the accordion that he has when he meets the drunk doctor…the doctor how much the instrument is and agrees to pay fifty dollars (maybe more than a few thousand in the money of this day)

Charley Anderson is quick to quit the bar where they met, before the inebriated buyer would change his mind, only to find the man again later…the doctor is actually happy with the instrument and the two talk and they get closer to each other, to the point where Charlie agrees to join the doctor and volunteer for the ambulance service in Europe – presumably the same in which John Dos Passos has enrolled and participated in the World War I – before it will all be ended, which the doctor fears will happen soon, or even before they have their chance…the doctor does not want to kill others…white men that is, for he is very open, willing to shoot dead…the n* word again, so we see a figure that had been more than agreeable transformed into a villain, all over the sudden, though some would protest, saying that at the time it was ‘normal’…others would dismiss this claim, saying that decent humans saw the injustice even then…

With the USA trilogy, John Dos Passos attempted to paint a comprehensive portrait of the United States through the entire first three decades of the 20th century, by means of an extremely creative range of techniques. This trilogy can very rightfully be compared beside other extremely ambitious works like The Grapes of Wrath or Atlas Shrugged--and in fact, in sheer ambition and scope, and especially in even-handedness, it surpasses both by a wide margin. Though his name has slipped into relative obscurity, in storytelling power, Dos Passos is very much in the league of his contemporaries Steinbeck, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald.

Norman Mailer once called this trilogy the most important American work of the 20th century (though the century was still far from over when he said this). A piece of work this huge and this ambitious is bound to be uneven in some ways, and any given reader is likely to connect with certain storylines more than others; as far as pure enjoyment goes, I'd probably rate the USA trilogy four stars, a little below The Grapes of Wrath (but vastly above Atlas Shrugged). I think, though, that Dos Passos' ambition and stunning synthesis of storytelling techniques have to be given their due: in these books he tried to capture the entire American experience, using the full range of techniques available to him and some uniquely his own--and he largely succeeded at this seemingly impossible task. Amazing, amazing work.

This is one of the most unusual books I have ever read. It is difficult to even describe the plot and it takes a while to learn "how to read". But, you finish with a pretty fair flavor of the United States (politically, economically, and socially) immediately preceding, during, and after WWI. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This book is still relevant even though it seems to have been forgotten--like many of the people described in the short bios interspersed throughout (Randolph Bourne, Charles Steinmetz,F.W. Taylor, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan, Rudoplh Valentino, etc.)I preferred it to The Great Gatsby.

I avoided reading this book until my late 40s. After reading it I felt I had just been witness to the crucible that was American 20th century political change. It was a sputtering, melting storm of different elements, converging and reforming as something different. Like the great films of old Hollywood, this epic is a type of American vision now sadly absent in American lit and arts. And it's replacements seem to me to be pale replicas, as if we lost something somewhere, or it was taken away from us. Read this to remember the struggles of those who fought the fascists in pre-WW2 America.

U.S.A. trilogy is a panorama of the nation. John Dos Passos knows every nook and cranny of the country. John Dos Passos knows all ins and outs of human soul so the book is a real gallery of human types.

“But the working people, the common people, they won’t allow it.” “It’s the common people who get most fun out of the torture and execution of great men… If it’s not going too far back I’d like to know who it was demanded the execution of our friend Jesus H. Christ?”

John Dos Passos hates movers and shakers but he has a great sympathy for the weak and the dispossessed.
Some are being killed by their avarice, some are being destroyed by their ambitions, some are being done in by their ideals but they all willy-nilly serve the progress.

Whether you like it or not the molding of the public mind is one of the most important things that goes on in this country.

Public relations and advertizing are two licit methods to deceive people.