Where it all goes wrong . . .

This was the hardest of the three books for me to get through (not feeling very optimistic about the USA that week, stories about people being stupid with money are always hard for me, I was less interested in Charley and Margo), but I am still giving it a four star review because the overarching trilogy is so good. I don't know why I really took to this trilogy when I had so much trouble with Manhattan Transfer. There are differences sure, but lots of similarities in the narrative style. Yes I really tore through this while I plodded through Manhattan Transfer. Glad I gave Dos Passos a second chance.

Triloogia viimane, kõige mahukam ja... kõige nauditavam. Nende järgedega võib vahel juhtuda, et sarja edenedes tekib kerge väsimus, ent siin on vastupidi - tõusvas joones. Fookus on siin veel paremini paigas kui eelmistes (või on asi selles, et lugejal on sisseelamiseks olnud tublisti aega, mitmed tegelased varasemast tuttavad). Võtmetegelasi ongi selles osas vähem ja uusi lisandub vähe.

Raamatu esimeses pooles on üsna tugevalt pildil aviaator Charley, kes jõuab tagasi Ameerikasse, otsib oma kohta elus, no kohe kõvasti otsib. Peamiselt seisneb see "koht" muidugi raha ja naiste otsimises. Leiab ta neid mõlemaid, ja mitte vähe!, aga nagu elus ikka, kui need kaks kokku saavad, siis lõpuks on raha otsas ja naised läinud ja kõik algab otsast peale. Charley-suguseid tunneme ilmselt me kõik. Vaatad/loed nende elu ja tahaks pead vastu betoonseina taguda.

Nii et jah, nagu kirjutas Õnnepalu "Paradiisis", et "sa mitte ei saa Paradiisi, vaid Paradiis saab sinu sisse..." Ilmselt on ihaldatud rahaga niisamuti, vähemasti siin raamatus. Raha valitseb lõpuks sind, mitte sina ei valitse raha.

Ka järgmine oluline tegelane Margie/Margo joondub raha järgi. Mis omakorda tähendab ka meeste järgi joondumist. Raha tuleb, raha läheb. Tema tuules saab lugeja aimu 1920ndate lavapealsest ja kaameraesisest elust, aga ka sellest, kuidas sinna jõutakse.

Ja siis see vaene Mary French, sinisilmne kommunist, kes komistab teiste oluliselt vähem sinisilmsete kommunistide otsa (nt mees, kes "ei usu kodanlikku moraali, aga naiselt ootab mõistmist ja kirglikku sõprust"). Üldine suhtumine on, et pereloomiseks ja lasteks ei ole enne mahti, kui Ameerikamaal kommunism õitsele lööb. Seni saab kasutada Maryt ja tema kontakte õilsate ideede elluviimise jaoks raha hankimisel.

Ah jaa, ainuüksi Henry Fordi ja Isadora Duncani mõneleheküljelise eluloolise vahepala eest tahaks autorile tunnustavalt õlale patsutada. Väga mõnusalt kirjutatud.

Do you ever start a series, and you're really digging it and read the first few books right in a row, and then decide you don't feel like reading the last book right at the moment, so you take a bit of a break, sure that you'll be back to finish up the series before any time at all because you like it so well, but then one thing leads to another and years have gone by since you devoured the first few books, and the details are no longer clear in your mind, so you put off reading the last book because you have a vague idea you might start the series again from the beginning to remind yourself of all the things you've undoubtedly forgotten in the meantime, but with all the tempting unread books on your list you never feel like making quite that large of a re-reading commitment, so the final book just sits on your shelves for years and years and possibly decades, caught in a kind of limbo, even though you're pretty much guaranteed to enjoy it if you'd just pick it up? Well, that's what happened to me with John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy.

For those who aren't familiar with this trilogy, its novelty is in its form. Dos Passos, an American Modernist and contemporary of Hemingway, Faulkner, Stein and the rest of that expat cadre, has assembled something less like a novel and more like a collaged portrait of the United States during three consecutive periods of history: The 42nd Parallel deals with the early years of the 20th century; 1919 is concerned with the American experience of World War I; and The Big Money, the long-awaited (to me) capstone of the trilogy, is concerned with the boom years following the War, during which America was hurtling unknowingly toward the Great Depression. (All three were written during the Great Depression, fro 1930 to 1936, so the shadow of coming events looms large over them, especially the last one.)

The novels in the series share a common structure: they are composed of four different types of sections, which alternate unpredictably with one another like an improvisational jazz piece. The "Newsreel" sections are themselves collages, juxtapositions of newspaper headlines, contemporary speeches, and fragments of popular songs of the time. Dos Passos is excellent, I think, at giving a sense of the sweeping progress of history as found in the minutiae of the popular media, and also a sense of its myopia and the self-serving language of politics, advertising, and the press. Forgive the lengthy block quote, but I think the easiest way to explain the Newsreels is just to show you how they work:

'Twarn't for powder and for storebought hair

De man I love would not gone nowhere


     if one should seek a simple explanation of his career it would doubtless be found in that extraordinary decision to forsake the ease of a clerkship for the wearying labor of a section hand. The youth who so early in life had so much of judgment and willpower could not fail to rise above the general run of men. He became the intimate of bankers



St. Louis woman wid her diamon' rings

Pulls dat man aroun' by her apron strings


     Tired of walking, riding a bicycle or riding in streetcars, he is likely to buy a Ford.



DAYLIGHT HOLDUP SCATTERS CROWD


     Just as soon as his wife discovers that every Ford is like every other Ford and that nearly everyone has one, she is likely to influence him to step into the next social group, of which the Dodge is the most conspicuous example.




desperate revolver battle follows


     The next step comes when daughter comes back from college and the family moves into a new home. Father wants economy. Mother craves opportunity for her children, daughter desires social prestige and son wants travel, speed, get-up-and-go.




MAN SLAIN NEAR HOTEL MAJESTIC

BY THREE FOOTPADS




I hate to see de evenin sun go down

     Hate to see de evenin sun go down

          Cause my baby he done lef' dis town

Juxtaposed with the Newsreels are sections of plain, accessible prose that tell the stories of fictional characters—the most traditional, novel-like elements of the book. These chapters are named for their main characters: "Charley Anderson," "Mary French." More on these later, but they probably make up between two-thirds and three-quarters of the text.

In amongst the Newsreels and story elements, there are also "Camera Eye" sections, in which Dos Passos relates his own experience in stream-of-consciousness prose. This is his attempt to expose the ostensibly "godlike" authorial voice for what it was: just another human living his life. And finally, in addition to the Camera Eye sections, there are also poems scattered through the books which tell the stories of famous real-life people of the era: Henry Ford, Rudolph Valentino, William Randolph Hearst, Thorstein Veblen. These are truthfully my favorite parts of Dos Passos's trilogy; his poem on Eugene Debs in The 42nd Parallel convinced me I'd found a new favorite writer. I think what I love about them is Dos Passos's mixture of resignation, sadness and anger at how, time and time again, complex and contradictory humans let their vices and petty prejudices mar their own endeavors. From "TIN LIZZIE," the poem on Henry Ford:

       One thing he brought back from his trip

       was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

       He started a campaign to enlighten the world in the Dearborn Independent; the Jews were why the world wasn't like Wayne County, Michigan, in the old horse and buggy days;

       the Jews had started the war, Bolshevism, Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche, short skirts and lipstick. They were behind Wall Street and the international bankers, and the whiteslave traffic and the movies and the Supreme Court and ragtime and the illegal liquor business.

       Henry Ford denounced the Jews and ran for senator and sued the Chicago Tribune for libel,

       and was the laughingstock of the kept metropolitan press;

       but when the metropolitan bankers tried to horn in on his business

       he thoroughly outsmarted them.

For Dos Passos, Ford's absurd, rabid racism and oddly obsessive provincial nostalgia (his desire that the whole world be "like Wayne County, Michigan, in the old horse and buggy days") coexists with a storyteller's appreciation of his business prowess and the epic change his cars created in the American landscape. Every person is simultaneously great and small, Dos Passos seems to be arguing; every person is at once admirable and hateful. The fact that Ford himself longed for old-fashioned quiet and simplicity, and spent his final years on a restored simulacrum of his father's farm, removed from the noise of his own automobiles, is just the kind of poignant, contradictory detail Dos Passos loves.

The actual "characters" of U.S.A., the ones invented rather than just evoked by Dos Passos, who are the subjects of the trilogy's prose sections, come from a variety of backgrounds, but often work hard to end up in a different part of society than the one in which they started: working-class, middle-America Charley Anderson, for example, gifted with machines and a flying ace in WWI, starts his own aviation company with a friend and ends up wealthy, married to a society girl; meanwhile Mary French, daughter of the Main Line, goes against her mother's wishes and leaves college to be a union organizer and community activist. The common thread, however, is that no matter what Dos Passos characters decide they want, it seldom makes them happy, and they usually end up sabotaging their own efforts in one way or another.

Indeed, the one uniting element of all the U.S.A. characters is that they are slaves to, and undone by, their vices, whether those be for sex, alcohol, social position, or money. The characters who do best both materially and psychologically, like actress Margo Dowling, are usually the most pragmatic, the ones who acknowledge that they're playing a survival game, and look out for themselves and (sometimes) those around them with an utter lack of romanticism. Margo has no grand illusions, especially once she passes the age of about twenty, and that saves her from the pathetic fate of those who keep telling themselves stories about who they are and what they want—stories that get less true all the time. Former golden boy and flying ace Charley Anderson is a particularly pathetic example of the Dos Passos milieu: believing his every whim has a compelling reason behind it (that his lust is love, and his drunken well-being happiness), he descends ever-farther into debt, alienation and alcoholism while telling himself stories about his flying brilliance. Even the activist Mary French, who is probably closest to Dos Passos in her leftist outlook and untiring political work, becomes a victim of her own illusions as she falls in love with a series of condescending, emotionally unavailable fellow activists.

This compulsion, in Dos Passos characters, to let their vices sabotage their dreams didn't bother me as much in the first two books as it did this time around, in The Big Money. I'm not sure if the series actually does become more bitter as it goes along, or whether I've become more sensitive in the ten years since reading the last two books—my guess is that both might be true. It would certainly make sense that, as the country careens toward the crash of 1929, Dos Passos would become more condemnatory of the way Americans were behaving, since he laid the responsibility for the depression of the 1930s squarely on the shoulders of the irresponsible stock market speculators of the 1920s, and on American capitalism as a whole. And it's not that I don't relate to the pattern he lays out—obviously it does happen, and it's a classic setup for a tragedy of the everyday. I just can't help believing that it doesn't happen to everyone—that idealism and dreams, while dangerous as a sole frame of reference, can be an important asset if balanced by practicality.

Despite my qualms about the uniformly miserable characters, though, I remain in awe of Dos Passos's technical verve and audacity, and I love the way he simultaneously creates a broad canvas of events on the national level, and an intimate canvas of regular individuals making their way.

Acesta este ultimul roman al trilogiei U.S.A. publicat pentru prima oară în 1936, când deja primul răboi mondial era uitat (fără a se ști că altul, la fel de crâncen, bătea la ușă) iar urmările marii crize americane se estompaseră.
Dintre vechile personaje, Charlie Anderson are parte de un accident de aviație urât, iar drumurile i se intersectează cu Margo Dowling, ceea care urmează a fi caracterul central al povestirii. Care povestire poate fi citită fără nici ujn fel de problemă ca un roman de sine stătător. Iar timpul investit ân cele câteva ore de lectură nu este nicidecum pierdut.

Me ha gustado mucho. La vida en lo felices 20 sería tal y como se describe. Dura pero con un poco de suerte se daba un gran golpe, pero bueno, después vinieron las consecuencias. La clase obrera (en el caso de la novela son mineros), bastante explotada y la poca solidaridad del resto de la sociedad. El mundo del teatro con sus altibajos y sus "coristas" ...
La primera novela de la trilogía, me pareció buena, la segunda no me gustó nada y está tercera me ha parecido excelente.
Buenos personajes, cruzándose entre ellos, uniendo sus vidas para dar sentido a la novela.
De todas formas, la novela no es nada blanda, retrata una vida dura, con grandes desigualdades y un añadido, el de la Ley Seca, dónde deambulan los personajes entre miserias, romances, alcohol y mucho vacío, ya sea en sus bolsillos o en sus vidas.

An interesting, engaging, historical fiction novel set in the USA. The book has four threads, three being non fiction. The fourth thread includes the narratives of five men and women. Charley Anderson, an aviator mechanic, airman, businessman / investor, (a main character in '1919'), still drinking and womanising; Margo Dowling, an independent beautiful woman with many male friends and some lovers who wants to be a successful actress; Mary French, a unionist who mixes with men involved in organising working class strikes; Richard Savage, a Harvard graduate and fairly successful public relations employee, (a main character in '1919'); They all find it difficult to be interested in starting a family, mostly living for the present day.

The other three, much shorter non fiction modes of address are ‘The Camera Eye’ where the author writes about his own life experiences is a little difficult to comprehend. ‘Newsreels’ which are actual headlines from newspapers of the time, fragments of news stories, advertising slogans and popular song lyrics. The third mode of address is brief lives of some of the important characters of the times including Frederick Winslow Taylor, (a consulting engineer in management), Henry Ford, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora O'Gorman Duncan, Rudolph Valentino, the Wright brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Randolph Hearst and Samuel Insull.

A interesting portrayal of the USA in the 1920s. Dos Passos certainly writes with a feeling of anger for the exploited, poverty stricken working class man. Whilst there is no plot, there is good reading momentum. Each character’s life is eventful.

A satisfying, interesting reading experience.

This book was first published in 1936 and is the third book in a trilogy titled ‘USA’. (less)

This past weekend, I finally finished The Big Money, the final book in John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy which began with The 42nd Parallel and 1919. I started reading the series because it kept showing up on lists of must-read 20th century literature. It probably belongs on them but not because it's especially profound or moving. Instead, it's a vivid picture (with a heavy socialist tint) of everyday American life in the years between McKinley's assassination and the stock market crash.

Dos Passos employs an unusual narrative structure which has an almost Cubist effect, revealing the world from a variety of distances and perspectives. The bulk of the work is a set of chapters that each focus on one of about a dozen characters, telling their stories from childhood onward. These stories are punctuated by the so-called "Newsreels," collages of headlines, news story fragments and snatches of lyrics of popular songs, that are sometimes reminiscent of Burroughs' fold-ins. The Newsreels provide both a sense of time and an immediate historical context. A deeper cultural and mythical context is provided by a set of biographies of important figures of the time beginning with Eugene Debs, proceeding through the likes of J.P. Morgan and Joe Hill, Henry Ford and Isadora Duncan, and ending with a nameless vagrant. Interspersed with these three narrative forms is a fourth obscure set of chapters that come under the heading "Camera Eye" and provide Dos Passos' impressions of various times of his own life. These are given without background or explanation but provide an immediacy absent from the rest of the book.

The tone throughout the trilogy is one of sustained bitterness. The individual characters lead eventful, but troubled and unsatisfying lives- WWI is actually a bright spot for most of them- which is probably why Sartre held the series in high esteem. At the outset there is some hope in the goals of the Wobblies. But while they are prominent in The 42nd Parallel, they've faded to irrelevance by the beginning of the third book. This process was helped along by mass arrests by Woodrow Wilson, documented in his own biography titled "Meester Veelson." This scathing chapter situated at the center of 1919 is in many ways the heart of the whole trilogy, highlighting Wilson's betrayal of his own ideals with a list of the efforts at reform he abandoned throughout his life. It is perhaps only outshined by the biography that appears at the end of 1919 titled "The Body of an American Soldier."

After the powerful conclusion of the second book, The Big Money initially felt perfunctory. I can't say that feeling completely disappeared by the end of the book, but Dos Passos managed to allay most of it by avoiding the predictable dramatic climax synchronized with the stock market crash. In fact, that event is barely mentioned in one of the last Newsreels. In the meantime, the stories of the various individual characters all sputter to unremarkable (though frequently premature) endings. The anger of the first two books is replaced with quiet resignation, which is probably the most fitting response to the first three decades of the 20th century in the United States.

I'm definitely not the obsessive reader that I used to be. I'm finishing this book 75 days (!) after starting it. In years past, it would have taken me 10 at most. It's 6 days shy of 6 months since I began this trilogy. Again, in years past, it would hardly have taken me a month. Why did it take me so long? 1. I just don't spend much time reading lately. This book probably got 5-10 minutes per day on the days I didn't skip completely (sometimes several at a time). 2. If I was fascinated with this trilogy as based on my review of the first book (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), it waned in the 2nd book, and really waned here. I honestly couldn't recount the characters or their stories at this point the way I could after the first book. So I realize that it sounds like I hated this book, and it would be fair to ask why I rated it even 3 stars.

Part of it is called benefit of the doubt. I don't know why, but I haven't been in a mood for serious fiction in quite a while. But I think I am when I start these books, and sometimes have a hard time quitting especially when they are revered classics. There have been times of my life that I would have read this faster and sustained the interest. The other reason is simple: respect for the art. It's an ambitious work. It's a book to be admired. I enjoyed some of it, just not that much.

A great book with some of the most realistic and complex characters I've ever read. You can tell this book was highly influential on contemporary narratives in its use of nonlinear storytelling and cynical realism. A stirring criticism of American culture in the 1920s.

In college one of my favorite professors told us that the great American novel has to be either The Great Gatsby or John Dos Passos' USA trilogy. So I've been curious about this trilogy for like ten years, and after finally reading it I'm a little disappointed. I can see why people would say it is the great American novel, and I loved the concept of what the author was doing, I just didn't enjoy actually reading it very much. Maybe if I read it closer and tried to understand every technique and reference closely I would get more enjoyment from it. But there's a lot of books with tons of experimentation and references that are still more fun to read than this, for me at least.

great fictionalised account of the american labour struggle at the beginning of the 1920s. can't wait to find out what happens to the international workers' movement and the comintern -- lots of promise here