”It was speech that clung to the ears, the link that tingled in the blood — USA.
USA is the slice of a continent. USA is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theaters, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dog-eared history books with protests sprawled on the margins in pencil. USA is the world’s greatest river valley, fringed with mountains and hills. USA is a set of big-mouthed officials with too many bank accounts. USA is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. USA is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly, USA is the speech of the people.”

The most ambitious of the Lost Generation writers — John Dos Passos made his famous contemporaries appear as pigmies next to his massive, experimental masterpiece. While Hemingway and Fitzgerald were exploring personal tales of machismo and crack-up, Dos Passos tackled the story of an entire nation and era, and did it with a brilliant, never before seen, experimental style.

USA presents a birds-eye view of America during the first three decades of the 20th century. It is the novel as massive mural, the novel as collage. It has no more plot than does your life or mine, yet remains constantly engaging. Dos Passos alternated his narrative between several different devices. He follows, in turn, many flawed, Everyman protagonist from their youth onward, allowing him to explore the development of American business, labor, arts, and entertainment, giving the perspective of the common man. This is broken up by many mini biographies of giants of the era who, unlike the protagonists, made history and were remembered by it. Interspersed with these are Newsreel segments, that give quick snippets of period headlines and popular song. Dos Passos injected his own, autobiographical voice as well in stream of consciousness interludes labeled The Cameras Eye.

USA’s ever shifting focus creates an ultra modern feel that belies the fact that it was written over nine decades ago. The constant cutting in and out between protagonist and the variously styled interludes feels remarkably similar to channel-surfing or scrolling through an internet feed. Its experimental style lends itself perfectly to audiobook, which I consider the optimum way to experience it.

The fragmented collage that is USA’s story is as bleak as it is fascinating. Dos Passos chronicles the beginning decades of the American century as a time of great promise, huge ambition, and constant striving, all consummating in hollowness, disappointment, and despair. In this, his work is similar to his Lost Generation buddies — just far more ambitious, fascinating, and on a far grander scale.

Please see my reviews of individual novels in this collection.

A brief note about this specific LOA volume: while the production value and editorial work on this volume is miles better than on the volume containing Dos Passos's first three novels, there are still major problems with the text and notes. In particular, I noticed several obvious textual errors, making these versions of the works _not_ definitive editions. Copy editing is important; it's too bad publishers and/or editors often skimp on this. The other problem is that the annotation of the third novel is deficient, spotty, or sometimes lacking entirely for important things like translations of foreign languages or 1920s slang expressions. These things severely impair the value of this volume in the LOA series and should be rectified in future printings (or in a revised edition).

I don't understand why everyone is still looking for the Great American Novel. It was written by John Dos Passos back in the '30s. Ok, its actually three novels bound together as a trilogy, but more's the luck. It you have ever wanted to go back in time and stand in the middle of America during the first part of the 20th century while everything happened around you, now's your chance. And be sure to have music by George Gershwin playing in the background. I like this book so much I own two copies; one that I've worn out and one that I haven't.

This book is not without merit. It is comprehensive and detailed, but it just doesn't measure up to a great novel. It is so long, three novels in one, actually, but finishing it is much more an accomplishment than a pleasurable experience. I'm glad I read it, but mostly because it is a check-off on the 100 greatest novels list from the Modern Library, and not because the prose or the stories edified me in any great way. The most interesting aspects of this novel are the chapters about real-life people, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, or the Wright brothers, rather than the fictional ones. This is a book I recommend, but only for the challenge of it, not for the pages and pages of articulate argument trying to make a case against American capitalism.

I read the first two books. It's impressive: the sheer scope, the dozens of characters. It's as good a shot as you can imagine at writing a novel about a whole country. It's undeniably a work of skill.

But at the end of the day I was bored. Two dozen characters but none of them were interesting. A hundred ups and downs of a hundred plots left an impression of flat grey homogenous sludge, a tube of a book that could just as well start or end at any point. The book requires the utmost effort of the reader to see any of the story strands through the mass, but doing so is unrewarding. You unravel the thread and what you get is the birth and life of a boring figure pushed through tedious melodramas that teach them nothing (and us less) interspersed with edifying dioramas of socialist politics.

It's been years since a book was such a slog. I certainly didn't do the book justice - I was forgetting who half the characters were by the time they cropped up two chapters later. But I was just provided no incentive at all to remember. What would I gain by remembering who Don Stevens was when he next appeared to say something derogatory about the bourgeoisie? When a passage came up that, in another book, I might have enjoyed, I was too bored and irritated to give it any time.

Joyful book to give up on.

Frantic and tedious, didactic and oversimplified, and always faintly artificial, like the characters are not real people, but instead a creaky bunch of marionettes held by a very old man with arthritis.

In the book there were many characters with different classbackgrounds and various uncontrollable sexualneeds. They dealt with the classtruggle in a way that was at times highlydramatic but also highly predictable. Everyone drank a lot and had sex a lot and the good characters came to realize that capitalism was destructive and evil, while the evil characters became monsters and just died horribly or else got richer and richer while talking about democracyandfreeenterprise.

All the female characters who aren't whores are ice-cold social climbers who live to tease tease tease regular joes who can't get a nickel or a squaredeal from the fat fat fat cigarsmoking bosses who just keep on getting richer richer richer.

A marvel in style combining stream of conscious autobiographical segments with snapshots of real life figures from the time, interweaving fictional narratives, and newsreel segments that provide a glimpse of newspaper headlines, article excerpts and bits of popular songs, John Dos Passos's USA trilogy is like nothing I have ever read before. While the novel, from the first installment to the last becomes increasingly pessimistic, reflecting Dos Passos's rightward shift and growing disillusionment, it is in its scope and style unparalleled, capturing the speech and political climate of the first three decades of the last century, from the Spanish American War to the Wall Street crash of 1929.

Of this edition, I will say that it is beautifully bound. The pages are light, the font easy to read. It also contains a chronology of events at the end, giving some context to the events in the author's life that were shaping him as an artist and a person (for better or worse), and helping the reading better make sense of the historical timeline of events.

It was a period of groundbreaking events: labor unrest, revolutions and threats of revolution, economic inequality, a world war, the Spanish flu. It was also a time of giants in arts, business and science - men and women like Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, William Randolph Heart, Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Wright Brothers, Rudolph Valentino, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Figures of greatness, genius, cunning, deception in an age of scientific progress, unparalleled violence and natural destruction. And it is perhaps more than anything else the story of the common men and women whose lives get tangled up in the whirl of world events, as often they do.

In sum it's an unforgettable book, a true landmark in modern literature.

Last night I chanced upon a book-related podcast during which one of the discussants mentioned that he had just started reading this and was impressed with how well written it was and how much he enjoyed it.

And I suddenly remembered how much I had enjoyed it, back in the early 1970’s when I first read (and re-read) it. I suppose it’s a sign of age that the idea of re-reading a trilogy this long does not now appeal to me. Too many books, too little time. But at the time I loved the sense of grounding in American history that flowed from the book.

Highly recommended (even if I’ve lost my copy over the years.).

Correction: I just realized I have a Library of America copy. Not that I have time to read those books, carefully accumulated over the years.

Originally published on my blog here in May and June 2000.

The 42nd Parallel

The first novel of the famous USA trilogy presents a picture of that country from the beginning of the century until 1917, when the US declared war on Germany. (The trilogy as a whole continues until the early 1930s.) In these novels, dos Passos created a new literary style, frequently admired if rarely imitated, in which documentary style clips are used to create background, to relate the characters to political and economic events and to make the novel seem to be a panoramic picture of the state of the nation.

Each section of the novel is divided into recurring pieces. The longest piece of each section forms the main story, and is basically a narrative about one of the main characters. Then there are newsreel sections, which contain headlines and clips from newspapers, often fragments of sentences as though what you read is an impression gained from flicking through a paper very quickly. There are also pieces summarising the lives of men and women who had a formative influence on their times, such as Thomas Edison. The most interesting pieces, though most difficult to take in, are the 'Camera Eye' narratives, which are also fragmented, and are basically stream of consciousness style snippets of description grouped together more or less randomly.

The end product of reading this novel is a feeling of atmosphere. The plot is not important (and, indeed, practically non-existent); characters may be well drawn, but their purpose is to illustrate the times in which they live. The way that the novel is put together is so clever that it can achieve this without using reams of description. The major problem is in the newsreel sections, because the material selected there presupposes a fair amount of knowledge of American politics in the first few years of the century. Headlines are not helpful in creating an atmosphere if you have never heard of any of the people mentioned.

Of the imitators of this trilogy, both the most successful and the one who has followed dos Passos most slavishly is John Brunner, in his series of dystopias. He has actually used what he has taken from the USA trilogy in a more fundamental way. Because he was writing science fiction, the whole background had to be invented, and Brunner used the documentary portions to establish parts of that background (such as slang expressions, bits and pieces of future mass media) picked up on in the later narrative portions.

The 42nd Parallel is more an extremely extended description than a novel in any traditional sense; its sections do not lead anywhere in particular, and the lack of plot means that the various characters are not integrated for any purpose (some of them meet, but that is all).

Nineteen Nineteen

The second part of the USA trilogy is about the involvement of that country in the First World War, from the declaration of war with Germany in 1917 to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It is a continuation of The 42nd Parallel, in the same semi-documentary style with two differences. The characters from whose points of view the fictional sections are told are now, though several are already known to the reader of the earlier book (the brother of one character, the best friend of another); and these sections are far longer in relation to the others.

This second change is the main reason why Nineteen Nineteen is less successful than its predecessor. The longer sections reveal dos Passos' weaknesses as a writer, particularly in the portrayal of character, and the reader loses interest. His concentration on the relationship between labour and capital becomes almost an obsession. (It is an important theme in the period of American history covered by the trilogy, which effectively saw the destruction of the far left as a political force.)

Much of the action takes place in France, and the main idea communicated is something of the effect that being soldiers in Europe - both on the front line itself, though this is skated over, and in the different culture behind it - had on the Americans who returned.

The Big Money

The final volume of dos Passos' USA trilogy deals with the book of the mid twenties, ending with the stock market crash. The theme is making money, big money, through industries that took off in that decade (aircraft manufacture, film), set against the usual background of labour relations.

The stricture of The Big Money is like that of The 42nd Parallel and Nineteen Nineteen, with the alternation of contrasting documentary and narrative sections. The weaknesses are also alike, particularly in plot and characterisation, and since dos Passos has further expanded the fictional sections, these weaknesses are yet more apparent.

All in all, I expected far more from this trilogy than it actually delivered, because I really liked novels which imitate it, like Stand on Zanzibar. It rather bored me, and towards the end I kept going mainly by thinking "just 150 pages to go". The idea is good, but the execution deeply flawed.

Modernism is therapeutic. For melancholy, Joyce; for jealousy, Proust; Virginia Woolf for despair. And for postmodern alienation? Salve Franzen and Foster Wallace with Dos Passos, whose 1938 U.S.A. trilogy simultaneously conjures and completes the “Great American Novel.” It’s like nothing else, except maybe The Great Gatsby, On The Road and Sunset Boulevard.

And Baz Luhrmann’s Australia? Yes, insofar as both texts expose the national via the romantic. (“What she hated most about him was the way he yawned.”) Both also have a soundtrack, delivered in U.S.A. via fragments between all-caps headlines: RAILROADS WON’T YIELD AN INCH; NEVER SAW HIM SAYS MANAGER. Then a biography of Edison that reads like beat poetry.

The second novel’s about the end of the Great War, rejecting “war to end all wars” before the Second World War begins. In elevating the war fiction genre the book itself becomes a historical source. “Henry Ford was right” the author decides in the 1930s. (Are we less historic or just less declarative?) For his structure Dos Passos doesn’t link as much as layer, describing armistice in Paris several times from different angles, “reiterative like the eddas.”

Actually a lot of U.S.A. is set in France, defining an identity by how it looks abroad. “We’ve been too much interested in money and material things,” says an American, “it’s taken the French to show us how to live.” As the writing turned bilingual I followed along, remembering Paris.

Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) is something of an anti-heroic epic, in which the intertwined lives of characters representing broad American types unfold to present a vision of America that fulfills the promise of American Idealism by drawing attention to the very elements that idealism so frequently undermines. In that sense, the U.S.A. of Dos Passos’ is a utopia – yet his abrupt juxtaposition of poeticized abstractions of historical elements and disjointed first person stream-of-conscious intrusions against his engaging narratives also hints at a dystopia: a reality in which his characters are unaware they exist, and which prefers they remain unaware. A superb example of thematic/stylistic balance.

I know that due to the limitations of length, school curriculums tend to only require Manhattan Transfer if they do require any Dos Passos, but in my opinion the U.S.A. trilogy is his masterpiece. If you enjoy historical fiction and ensembles casts that stretch over multiple generations, this is a must for you.