The 42nd Parallel

This is the first of the three novels in Dos Passos' "U.S.A." trilogy. I have been meaning to read them for years. A John Updike review finally convinced me to give it a shot.

The trilogy has the reputation of being experimental. The stories of five Americans of the early 20th century are told in pieces cut up by sections called Newsreel, which is broken up pieces of news stories of the day, and The Camera Eye, which seems to be Dos Passos' stream of consciousness memories, and sections which are short impressionistic sketches of famous men of the day like Henry Ford, Eugene Debs and Thomas Edison.

I found the stories of the typical Americans fascinating. All five come from the lower or lower middle classes and are striving for American success. They grow up to be a Union organizer, an executive secretary, a big time business man or a New York designer. None of them are heroes, or villains. They are all ambitious to cash in on the American dream. Dos Passos tells their story in a calm documentary tone. He shows them just swept along by the world.

The other stuff in the novel, the newsreels, Camera Eye and mini-bios, are what tends to get talked about. I wasn't impressed. The newsreel are random and don't really give a sense of the world. The Camera Eye goes no where and gets pretty gassy at times. Some of the mini-bios capture the subject. The chapter on Bob Follette does a good job on him. Most of them don't tell much new.

Read it for the stories of average Americans and browse through the fancy stuff that made it talked about.

Dos Passos has an odd habit of squishing words together to make one word. He gives us, for example,
"Itoldyouso"
"sundayschool"
"fellowpassengers"
"mortgageridden"
'pastryshop"
"realestate"
"downattheheels"

(Spellcorrect does not approve of this list.)

Bom det er et monster af en bog at få i hånden 1184 sider. De første sider virker stilen stiv og rå. man undre sig over de tre stilistiske skrivestile der bruges Newsreel, The Camera Eye og portrette af virkelige og fiktive personer. Men som man komme ind i bogen og vender sig til stilen gør disse tre dele hver deres del til at beskrive en tid et folk og en kamp.

Dette er en fantastisk bog og har man lyst til at læse om klassekamp og USAs tidlige historie er dette bogen. Der skal dog advares om at det ikke er en bog hvor siderne vender sig selv. det er en bog der kræver en indsats men til gengæld belønner bogen den trofaste læser.

Jeg anbefaler varmt John Dos Passos en forfatter der blev hædret som det 20 århunderts største forfatter for siden at gå i glemmebogen, både af eftertidens læser og af den politiske kamp han trode så meget på.

After working my way through it for the last six months, I've finally finished The USA Trilogy. While a rigorous task it was a highly enjoyable one. Last year I read Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, my favorite novel of last year, and I wanted to read another novel with a similar style. The USA Trilogy was a perfect fit, hitting that same desire.

The USA Trilogy is a book of many things and it's hard to easily describe. Within the first couple of hundred pages I came up with the elevator pitch, "If a leftist Ernest Hemingway wrote On The Road". While I still like this description this book is far more than just that. The USA Trilogy is a war novel, a romance novel, a travel novel, a political novel. It's a work of realism as well as surrealism. It is factual while also being poetic. While this is a series of three books, I've never read another book that takes on as much as The USA Trilogy does. John Dos Passos takes on a lot and accomplishes so much with these works, I'd be hard pressed to not say this is my pick for The Great American Novel.

The themes of The USA Trilogy aren't anything too relavatory by today's standards. America is a place of two worlds; those who have and those who don't. There are highs and lows and often you don't stick in one category too long; especially if you are willing to take risks. Fortunes can be made and lost overnight. There are many stories of characters losing it all to their own ego or jealousy and likewise these characters can recover, although not entirely, due mainly to who they are and who they know.

Like I said, these themes aren't anything new to a modern reader but it's about how Dos Passos tells this story. The USA Trilogy has a cast of about a dozen protagonists who we follow. They all come from different walks of life and sometimes their paths cross. We explore the lives of lobor workers, entrepreneurs, people born into wealth, and those skating by. We are introduced to these characters, given insight into their childhood and upbringing and led through their lives, sometimes until their demise. This is what makes this book so vast. If you are someone who likes well fleshed out characters there's no better book out there.

With a cast of characters like this you'd think it would be hard to keep everything straight. I found it to be pretty easy to understand. Sometimes you will return to a character after not hearing about them for a few hundred pages but their backstory would quickly come back to me. As someone who took multiple breaks while reading this I found this to be a great benefit of the book.

Beyond just the narrative of this book, there are many other elements Dos Passos offers to create this world of early 20th Century America. Outside of these characters there are also Newsreel and The Camera Eye segments. Newsreel segments are a montage of headlines that give you a brief understanding of what is going on at the time of this section of the book. The Camera Eye is a more abstract segment that is far more poetic than anything else in the book. These are often more direct entries from Dos Passos and don't fit in as much with the timeline of narrative. These segments are often only a few pages long and work as a great palate cleanser between character segments.

There are also biographies of real life historical figures featured throughout. These figures can be be anyone from well known figures such as presidents Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, as well as figures like Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Ford, or the Wright Brothers to more obsure labor workers. These biographies are written with Dos Passos opinion of them in mind. While nowhere near impartial it is very entertaining, making for some of the more engaging sections of the book.

As a fan of history, especially 20th Century history. I found this book to be a great joy. While the character's we follow are works of fiction. They live in a very real world. We follow characters from the late 19th century into the 1920's. Every world and national event that happens during that time is discussed. WWI, The Spanish Flu Prohibition, the roaring 20s. It is great to see how everyday people lived through those times and how a lot of times it is similar to our world today. This book greatly benefits from being written in the 1930s by someone who lived through these times, reflecting back on them. If it was written in the moment it probably wouldn't have felt as timeless.

I was often surprised just how well Dos Passos captures these massive historical events through the lense of the everyday person. You can read history books about these events but it hits different to see them through the eyes of someone like yourself. Experiencing what it was like to be there the day America annouced it joined WWI or how people still went out for a night on the town during prohibition is something that a textbook will never be able to convey. One of these scenes I really found interesting to read was what the anti German and pro war sentament was like during the 1910s. There is a scene in which a character goes to a hofbrauhaus in New York. The house band is playing The Star Spangled Banner every other song and everyone, who is a "true patriot" is standing up and removing their hat. Our character doesn't do this leading to many dirty looks and a very hostile environment. This is something you can't capture outside of a novel like this.

While there are a lot of characters, from many different backgrounds, I will say the scope of The USA Trilogy doesn't go beyond a white perspective. This is not surprising for a book by a white author from the 1930s, I wasn't expecting anything different going into this but I should mention it. As much as I would praise the historical aspects of this book it isn't a full view of America, which is dissapointing for a book with such an all encompassing and socialist goal. If there are mentions of non white characters they are often very minor and in subservient roles. While not really going too far into the lives of those outside of a white perspecitve I do appreciate Dos Passos' choice to capture the discrimination that white ethnicities such as Jews, Italians, and Germans faced at this time.

Overall I really liked this book. There are definitely some lulls in the narrative and it can feel very mundaine. That being said, this just adds to the character building and realism. No actual person's life is all excitement. These slow points actually help emphasise the highs. There are a few times we actually get to see how a character dies, sometimes in a very strange or abrupt manner. This can be very jarring and impactful. We've followed these character's since their childhood and all of the sudden they're dead. It really goes to show that we are all just one freak accident away from leaving this world forever.

I've only started to scratch the surface of what this book has to offer. As far as a narrative goes I think I preferred Berlin Alexanderplatz mainly because it followed just one character and one city but the reach of The USA Trilogy is far from unwieldy. It is a lot more comprehensible and accessable than it would lead on. The page count really is the only reason I see as a legitimate deterrent for people getting into it.

Its portrayal of morally decadent and heartless socialites in some ways out-Hemingway's Hemingway (see "The Sun Also Rises"). But the trilogy is remarkable for the way it synthesizes the major historical themes of the 1920s shortly after the decade ended. Dos Passos is sharply critical of capitalism, but recognizes the power of the economic system, which is now larger than (and feeds upon) individuals. His sympathies lie with the leftist critics, who repeatedly fail to propose a viable alternative to capitalism.

The book is a product of its time regarding race and LGBT issues, although it's worth noting that Dos Passos criticizes characters who end friendships because of racial or religious prejudice. Some of the "Camera Eye" passages, in which Dos Passos employs stream-of-consciousness prose, come across as weak imitations of James Joyce. The reader struggles to keep the many bankers, lawyers, and bureaucrats straight, but I suspect that is Dos Passos's intention, showing how people become faceless agents of capitalism. Despite these reservations, I think "U.S.A." is clearly a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, and on a historiographic level it provides genuine insight into the lives of working-class white Americans between 1895 and 1929.

My what a splendid book this is. Vast in its scope and magnanimous in its treatment of the varied strata that made up a nation coming to terms with the 20th century. I defy you to enjoy this, despite it being well over 1,000 pages long, a trilogy that follows 12 characters some related and others not. Not only is it written in a style that is incredibly accessible for such a long novel, it’s written in four styles that are incredibly accessible. Even the stream of consciousness episodes are so well crafted and (ahem) so short, that they fly by.

While I enjoyed the characters and what they got up to, what I most enjoyed was how I saw the nation of the US through their eyes and experiences. It was a promising time for the US and various ideals are put to the test including the spectral opposites of capitalism and socialism. Neither of them come off well, but I kind of felt, a bit like in Sinclair’s masterpiece The Jungle, that it was the ones who espoused a more societal basis for life that were painted with more touches of heroism. Certainly, you sympathised a lot more with those who fell victims to mass industry and the drive to industrialise at the sake of the common man.

Certainly Dos Passos here composed a classic but not just for his storytelling skills. It’s a nation analysed and put to the test of history. Interestingly, it shows how weak the ideals are, ideals that, even today are either praised or vilified in equal measure depending on which facet of US citizenry you talk to. I’m not sure that the US has really grown much more mature in its pursuit of an identity than it is portrayed in this novel. I wonder what the USAnians among you would respond to that.

For outsiders who want to know more of why the US is as it is, this is a good novel to reflect on. There’s such a vast amount here to consider there’s no way to do it justice. Even just one of the 12 character threads would provide book clubs with hours of discussion. For those of you on the inside, I think this is a good one to have under your belt to say you know where US literature is coming from and to provide food for thought as you continue to build on what those 12 characters built before you.

The USA trilogy comprises three books that really read as one continuous story. It tells the tales of numerous individuals as they are buffeted by the currents of history around the early part of the 20th century. The format of the novels is uncoventional: interspersed among the passages about the characters in the book are news headlines, vignettes of historical figures and autobiographical sketches. There is no single plot, and there is no tidy ending for many of the characters

The lives are consumed by the search for money, alcohol and sex. The most passionate people are the lrft-wing activists, who are presented sympathetically in their struggles for the working class. However, despite the exacting detail of the lives of the main players, conspicuously absent - except for brief instances - is love. Without this particular quality, the characters' lives seem purposeless.

This is a monumental work, a great American novel. It is long, and there are many characters and details to remember; however it is well worth the effort to read.

I had a habit of writing English papers about economics in literature, so the U.S.A. trilogy is like a dream come true. A student could spend years writing about class and money in this book. What really made it sing for me was my own sadness about the America that could have been and the America that happened instead. Add to that Dos Passos's fantastic voices and it's well worth a read.

It took me approximately a month to read each volume. Challenging but rewarding. The trilogy is really one (very long) chronological novel broken into three volumes, with the narratives of a dozen or so recurring characters whose lives frequently intersect. Each volume is a snapshot of the socio-economic and political landscape in the USA from 1900 to 1930. "The 42nd Parallel" covers 1900 up to WWI; "1919" covers WWI and the critical year (1919) Wilson spent is Paris negotiating the Treaty of Versailles and advocating for the League of Nations; and "The Big Money" moves from the boom of the Roaring 20s to the bust of the 1930s. Interspersed are mini biographies of significant figures of the times, including Eugene Debs, William Jennings Bryan, Carnegie, Edison, John Reed, JP Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Isadora Duncan, and William Randolph Hearst. Dos Passos employs a couple of experimental literary modes (“The Camera Eye” and “Newsreel”) which interrupt the narratives with snippets from headlines, advertisements and popular songs and subjective sensations experienced by the author in his life. I found these tiresome and tended to skim them. Dos Passos writes sympathetically about the struggles of working class and of labor movement in this period – with great disdain for the wealthy capitalists. The writing is fantastic and the overall experience for the reader is exhilarating. However, the racism, antisemitism and ethnic slurs strewn throughout is jarring.

I had never given Dos Passos any considerable attention due to his reputation as a communist turned right-wing sell out, but hearing of the experimental nature of this volume of three novels intrigued me. I searched used bookstores and online sources for a couple of years before I broke down and bought a used copy online. Reading was slow at first, but once I got into it, it was engaging. His use stream of consciousness and different characters as narrators gave the novel a sense of the burgeoning anxieties and struggles of American life in the early 20th century. The character segments are linear, but Dos Passos has other chapters added in to show a more abstract sense of Information Age anxieties, with Newsreel sections cobbling together random newspaper headlines and article blurbs and Camera Eye chapters that generally gives a stream of consciousness description of a thematically relevant event, both being representations of new technology that was changing the perceptions of human beings. Additional chapters also have short biographies of prominent figures of the age, from JP Morgan and WR Hearst to the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison. The most evident theme is the struggle of average Americans (and all humans) in the wake of the Robber Baron's powerful capitalist monopolies and the disparity of wealth that led to the rise of Communism across the world, but specifically the American perspective. Ultimately, Dos Passos became a Conservative which perhaps dulled the influence of this work, but I find that many of the issues and themes in this book are still looming over us a hundred years later. The most pleasant surprise for me was Dos Passos' musical poetic writing that I had not anticipated. This book should be given prominence in the study of great American literature as it not only a well-crafted complex work but it accurately reflects the realities of a time that have been erased by the progress of Capitalist wealth and its revisionist history that had worked to erase the struggles of the working class in America.

Yow! Too much to say about this - random observations - the depictions of post-WWI US and European strategy around control of oil-producing parts of the globe seems startlingly up-to-date, as does the wrangling of various business tycoons with the recently birthed FDA.
By contrast, the tribulations of anyone who catches a venereal disease in the era before antibiotics, the passing reference to an "icebox" that actually required blocks of ice to keep things cold and so on are interesting period detail. The actual prose style is so 20th century that the narrative often feels much further forward in time than any number of books with which it is contemporaneous.

Read in the 1960s and it was fresh even then when it was 30 years old. Still one of the great novels of all time. Innovated in sturcture and socially correct. It's on my short re-read list!

If these were true novels--if they had plots, old-fashioned, with an entangling, a climax, and an unravelling--perhaps I might care for them. If they had a striking style, whether it be "poetic" in any sense of the word, whether it be a Joycean stream of consciousness or incessant punnery, perhaps I might care for them. Instead, they were a step towards modernism that splunged into a vat of blandest porridge.

What is most "modernist" about these novels are the odd chapters stuffed in the midst of the normal, novelistic ones. These come in three varieties: the "Newsreel" chapters combine often-truncated newspaper headlines with snippets of articles and pairs or quatrains of lines from popular songs. These are meant to evoke the "popular mind" of the era; I find these work best in 1919, where the Great War (which Hitler unGreated) dominates, though there are also a couple of good ones about job hunting in The Big Money ("Newsreel XLVII" and "Newsreel LI", for instance). Then there are the "Camera Eye" chapters, bad attempts at stream-of-consciousness writing, supposedly to put you "in the action." They're usually disjointed from everything else. Occasionally, they work interestingly; I like the contrapuntal chapters, like "Camera Eye (12)" from The 42nd Parallel, contrapunting an early sexual experience with a French tale of an evil wolf-creature ("Loup Garou"); there was also occasional Camera Eyes in 1919 that worked to convey a war-time feel. Finally, there are the odd biographies, a smidgen-poetic'y, with nonsensical enjambements between paragraphs; the Andrew Carnegie one ("Prince of Peace," from The 42nd Paralell) is probably the most famous, though the one I found most striking was the one on the Unknown Soldier that concludes 1919 ("The Body of an American").

Outside these strange, self-consciously "modernist" chapters, the rest of the work is an attempt at a novel with a dozen or so (across the trilogy) main characters. Various characters overlap, running into each other's stories, but it never really feels satisfying. It's not like some minor character in the first book becomes a major plot point in the last; there aren't really plot points; it's a meandering muddle of streams. Take, for instance, "Janey" from The 42nd Parallel; she ends up becoming the secretary of J. Ward Moorehouse from the same book; she keeps appearing in the background in the other two books, but she doesn't matter in the least, even though her brother Joe Williams is a major character in 1919. Some major characters simply disappear, such as "Mac" or "Fainey" from The 42nd Parallel; sometimes there is an oddball reappearance, like "Charley Anderson," who first appears as the last chapter of The 42nd Parallel and then becomes one of the major characters of The Big Money. But most stories simply peter out into nothingness.

The trilogy title "U.S.A." hints at a panoramic view of the country and its conditions; the first main character of The 42nd Parallel, "Mac" or "Fainey," with his constant wandering around the country, seems to start to fulfill this promise. But most of the trilogy does not. Almost all of 1919 isn't even in America at all: it's in Europe or (for Joe Williams' chapters) at sea. Most of The Big Money is in big cities, New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, etc. And Dos Passos has no real sense of place, at least in this trilogy. You never get a feel for the different cities, or the smaller towns occasional characters pop in to. Descriptions are fairly lacking, and feel flat. There is a strange sense of attempts to keep the "plot" moving at a fast clip, skipping years of main characters' lives when nothing interesting happens, yet it still feels like nothing happens.

That's the real fault of the work: there's no real sense of plot. Things happen, marriages come and go (often basically in the background), there's a rise and fall of fortunes, but it doesn't feel like it matters, you don't feel connected to any characters. It doesn't help that so many plots points are repeated: probably 3-5 (if not more) characters are robbed blind by prostitutes; there's a number of vehicular accidents, sometimes fatal, sometimes not; marriages keep being joined and broken, without much consequence; in the first two books, almost everyone becomes socialist, with rarely a reason for it (Mac/Fainey being the main exception, I thought); some real capitalists finally appear in The Big Money, alongside a fervent socialist like Mary French. (It does seem the heavy socialist presence was a part of the trilogy's popularity at the time, at least among certain groups; the author later became a conservative, writing, for instance, for the National Review.)

In general, though, the overall feeling of the trilogy is flatness or blandness. I never really felt like I knew many of the characters; I truly don't remember a large portion of them, and I just finished this trilogy after a week or two of reading. Characterization is not a strong point. Neither is plot. Neither is setting. I truly don't know of anything that's particularly "strong" in the whole trilogy. The most effective novel is 1919, but part of that is that war is always interesting; it gave a helpful linking point for the various characters (almost all of whom are technically involved in the war effort, pacifistically (a socialist can't shed blood, I guess), but whom we almost entirely see l0unging about in European cities, without a care in the world), and it especially drove the "Newsreel" sections. For most of the trilogy, though, I simply didn't see a point; the characters bounced about from place to place, often simply disappearing, sometimes reappearing later, but without my feeling anything for them. The most stridently "modernist" thing about the trilogy, besides all the weird chapters, is the inexplicably random wordmushing with not much intention behind it. It's a jarring, weirding technique that can be useful (cummings seemed to love it), but it, like all the rest, feels flat here.

I'm sad that I have to rate this as low as I do; based on how much I enjoyed the trilogy, I should probably lower it even to one star. I guess the famousness of the novel, and the famous modernism of it (I have a soft spot for these early-1900s modernists), is holding the rating at two stars; I will also repeat that a number of elements work better in 1919 than in the other two novels, and, I have to say, I was interested in the journey of "Mac"/"Fainey" in The 42nd Parallel, before it abruptly stopped in Mexico. In all, though, sad to say, I simply found the trilogy flat. Even for fans of modernism, I cannot recommend it.