Overall still a great book. It starts strong, and a lot of the characters development carries on through this final installment of the trilogy, however, I would say there is a drop in quality. It lacks the kaleidoscopic nature of the first two books, and feels more of a case of wrapping up the stories of a few key characters, which is natural given its the ending of the trilogy. That said, it seems to lack the same manic energy that characterised the first two installments. On the other hand this may well be a deliberate statement though, as the world of the 1900s and 1910s is fading away into the past. This isn't so much a stylistic criticism, but rather more just reflects the fact that I personally did not enjoy it as much as the first two.

Three as one

Reading the U. S. A. Trilogy, of which this book is the third, has felt like a gift. The author's chronicles of a time and place- our very history- are so masterfully laid out they can only be art. That kind of painful art that keeps you thinking and winds its way in to daily thoughts. I found myself wishing for such a chronicler of these modern times, but where are our masters of the art now?

i’m still not exactly sure how i feel about dos passos. interesting concept, unsure on the execution

I'm so glad I finally got to read DosPassos. There's not much I can say about "The Big Money" (volume 3 of the USA trilogy) that hasn't already been said by all sorts of people much smarter than me, over the past several decades. In "The Big Money" DosPassos captures the spirit of a generation- the "lost generation"- as the lives of several characters intersect and intertwine in the years between the end of the First World War and the crash of 1929. Looking back from DosPassos' perspective at the time of writing, it seems like the 1929 crash and the ensuing Depression were a judgement, of sorts, on American society: paying the piper for years of crass materialism, empty satisfaction of material and physical wants (wealth, sex, and booze), and the betrayal of the American dream: no longer was wealth- even mere security- obtained through work and innovation; rather, through manipulation of financial markets and abuse of credit. (I know! I know! History is repeating itself!) There's nothing like a traditional plot here: DosPassos' characters simply drift through the decade, experiencing the base thrills and degradation that the America's economy and society had to offer. DosPassos uses some innovative techniques to tie everything together and provide social/political/economic context to the book- including "Newsreel" chapters containing snippets from headlines and news stories, stream-of-consciousness "Camera Eye" bits presenting his themes in stark relief, and- most interestingly- mini-biographies of prominent Americans of the era (Henry Ford, Frederick Taylor, Frank Lloyd Wright, others) who helped shape the first decades of "The American Century." DosPassos uses the Sacco and Vanzetti case- with which he was personally involved- as a simulacrum of the demise of the American working class, and the ultimate victory of the financiers. Powerful stuff. I'm going to read more.

‘Here’s where the strings come in.’ So sayeth Ubu Superchunk, so say I in regard to this final installment of the USA tri-logorrhea. Dos Passos saves all the Zim; brings all the Zam; holds back no Zoom as our formerly disparate threads weave the rope with which to hang the collective American Self. It’s moving stuff, it’s realistic; ‘idealistic’ having died and risen, died and risen, like some guileless, shitkicker Lazarus until a factory came into being whose machinery was efficient enough to kill and kill the little fucker every time his towhead popped back into being. That factory’s still going today—all it produces are dead Lazari, and its carcinogenic effluvium is expelled into a Great Lake. I don’t know which one. Erie?

1919, the previous entry in the series, functions as Dos Passos’ exposition of how America was bought cheap and sold high. The forces that impelled the American war machine into effecting mass death in WWI are weighed and found to be wholly predicated upon a calculus of profit and loss. That the loss was human, for God’s sake, is immaterial...literally; people make themselves for free! Does the human reproductive system know no P&L, not even the basest rules of commercial accountancy? Luckily, well, no. People keep on fucking, making a whole lot of free fucking capital for expenditure with no investment outlaid. Outstanding American: you do your job by making more You. Keep it up. (Puns…)

The Big Money is the cementing of the roast carving at Versailles, the liminal vacuum that resulted in Vichy France, etc. If it stopped there, it would be a history lesson brilliantly told, but without any soul to it. And Dos Passos, here Dos Pathos, do bringeth the Soul to its cynosure as the thesis of USA. Though the characters, the bulk of whom we’ve followed behind for far more than 1000 pages, most often find that dissolution is the only solution to the problem of American life, it is all earned pain on Dos Passos’ part. There are no tactical ministrations of tweaking your heartstrings. Never going for the Easy Sad or the Big Happy, where we part from his cross-section of women and men is, largely, just realistic. And that sonofabitch known as Reality, by definition and constitution, is far more pulverizing in its attrition than most novels cede. The fact of the matter is that the majority of us are not eaten by our white whale, thus fulfilling fate while establishing cliché. Nor do we find our chairs and our jets, a la Murphy; get our old asses to shore with our metaphors eaten but still attached to the canoe; receive the ravine of dogs in Old Mexico for our corpses to be wolfed (get it?) down; etc. etc. We just face the daily pulverizer, with varying degrees of dignity, until we each hit our all-time low.

As such, in The Big Money we say goodbye, midsentence, to people that have made us feel so substantively that they have effected real change in history through You, the reader. What more can books do? What more can we ask of letters arranged in such a way as to partially come to arrange and, thusly, define ourselves? How do we ever find closure when the one page, analogous to one day of actual life, is suddenly—

(That’s how: We just end: And everything with it—funk to funky)

Final book in the USA trilogy.
I love the way the author wove 3 different stories and interspersed it with bios of famous people and added newsreels and popular songs of the time he was writing in. Made for a highly entertaining read.

در نیوپورت برای خانم های ثروتمند رقصید که در طی رقصش به رباعیات عمر خیام هم گوش می دادند. وقتی هتل وینزور در آتش سوخت همه چمدان ها و همچنین صورتحساب همه بدهی های نپرداخته خود را از کف دادند و با یک کشتی حامل احشام به لندن رفتند تا از مادی گری زادگاهشان آمریکا بپرهیزند...

This was the my first time reading John Dos Passos. This was the third book of a trilogy about America, America over a hundred years ago. The book had several vignettes of American life and stereotypical American personality types of the time put together in a collage format interspersed with song lyrics, newspaper headlines and articles. There were also some stream of consciousness thrown in as well. Some of the writing was poignant and even brilliant, but overall I found the book to be long and unevenly written.

There’s a ton of great reviews on this trilogy without adding my two cents. I will say that I loved these books. Just loved. I’m consistently amazed at all the great literature that exists in the world especially those that have been sitting on my shelf just screaming to me to be read. What the he** was I waiting for??? Nevertheless I finally read and it didn’t disappoint. I can see why so many of the writers I admire and love have called this out as inspiration (Kerouac, Miller, Mailer…just to list 3).

My only suggestion is to try and read them either back-to-back-to-back or at the least, as close together as possible. It really brings out each character and the entirety of the early 20th Century. Highly recommended!

This is probably my least favorite of the three volumes, though I did enjoy the early parts of Margo's and Mary's stories. Much of this volume was taken up with Charley Anderson's rise and fall in shorting the stock market, but what exactly was happening was a pretty big muddle. The characters spoke in generalities about their plans and it read a little bit like someone who is completely out of the loop's idea of what playing the stock market might look like.

EUA, anos 20 do Séc. XX. É com uma América a retomar a marcha interrompida pela IGM, numa América com um fosso cada vez maior e chocante entre uma classe média e alta em ascendência galopante embalada pelo canto do dinheiro fácil das Bolsas VS uma classe operária formatada pelo Fordismo e Taylorismo e empurrada para uma luta desigual e romântica contra um capitalismo, em vésperas do Crash de 1929, que Dos Passos encerra a trilogia USA.

"América a nossa nação foi vencida por estranhos que compraram as leis e vedaram os prados e abateram as florestas para pasta de papel e transformaram as nossas cidades amenas em bairros miseráveis e espremeram em suor a riqueza ao nosso povo e quando querem pagam ao carrasco que acciona o interruptor" p. 438

Apesar desta leitura ter constituído uma experiência muito enriquecedora, e muito aconselhável para quem se interesse por esta época e os movimentos de diversa índole que nela surgiram, a meu ver a 5ª estrela não foi alcançada, sobretudo porque é com algum desagrado que ao fim de 1000 e tal páginas acompanhando uma série de personagens que percorrem os três volumes (nuns como principais e noutros como secundárias, tendo algumas só surgido no último) o desfecho para a maior parte delas mostra-se claramente insípido, na verdade nem se pode falar de desfecho, o autor pura e simplesmente abandona-as nas suas rotinas de uma sociedade Americana que encara, e bem, como a História, de resto, viria a provar, de forma muito crítica e negativa, reforçando-se mais uma vez aquela compreensão de que as personagens mais não são do que instrumentos/ retratos de uma Nação num dado tempo, de personagens metafóricas presas em realidades complexas e que, embora, cruzando-se ao longo das décadas continuam a viver sozinhas e incompreendidas em desencantados planos/mundos paralelos.

This is the third and final book in the Dos Passos USA Trilogy. Having read the previous two and Manhattan Transfer I knew what to expect and had gotten used to the experimental 'Camera Eye' and 'Newsreel' sections.

This one moves beyond the First World War into the 1920s as the United States is shook up by the development of big corporations, the emergence of aviation, Hollywood and the stock market. As in the other books, the lives of the main characters - aviator Charley Anderson, socialist campaigner Mary French, and actress Margo Dowling, are set amidst a backdrop of historical events, short biographies of major figures of the time, and economic and social upheaval. Dos Passos jumps between the arcs of these different character's stories, which all tend to end up in tragedy. I think there is no real fall off in the final book and each one stands up on its own merits, but contributes to the overall hole. If you liked the other novels in the trilogy then you should also enjoy this one.

As it is the last one, I guess it is worth reflecting on the trilogy as a whole. Coming in at around 1,300 pages there it is a great tome and I think I have had enough of this kind of thing for a little while. I have read about how influential the book is in terms of its depiction of historical events, reportage style description, trying to capture the lives and speech of ordinary people but that isn't really saying much about how good the novels themselves are. Also the sheer scope, variety and breadth that Dos Passos covers is undoubtedly impressive. Some of the language is plain offensive and some aspects of the book do now appear dated but that is true of a lot of books of around this period.

What I think is probably a stronger criticism is the strength of the characters is not particularly powerful in that a lot of them merge into each other without a lot of differentiation. Also things that happen to the characters are described with quite a cold, detached level of observation that doesn't get you that emotionally involved in their fates (which is also re-enforced by the multiple narrative style). In a way though, I think this doesn't matter that much, in that the book is about the bigger picture of the USA in the early Twentieth Century and the broader canvas of how the American Dream of working people is continually thwarted and shattered by the course of events which are manipulated by people with power and money for their own ends. In that context the individual stories of particular Americans are just part of a wider tragic picture as far as Dos Passos is concerned.

On that basis, if you like the kind of Great American Novel type book, which is painting on a big, broad canvas and reporting on people's lives as part of a wider portrait of a society at a particular time, then you will enjoy this. If however you are looking for strong characters in tightly packed plots then you may well be disappointed (and should not read over a thousand pages of this stuff). I veer towards the former so I liked it.