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Although there are undeniable moments of brilliance Dos Passos's first novel, there are also serious and tedious issues with it. What he did well was some truly remarkable thinking about the implications of the basic training-indoctrination process on individual and mass psychology. Much of what he writes, especially early in the novel where he compares the soldiers produced for World War I in America to mass-produced, assembly line commodities, anticipates the thinking of some of the Frankfurt school theorists 15 years after he published this book. It's quite clear that Dos Passos was doing a lot of reading in philosophy, economics, and perhaps sociology while he was working on this novel. He also does some very wonderful things with prose registers; different characters think and speak in different linguistic registers, which reminded me of James Joyce's work in _Portrait of the Artist_ and _Ulysses_. The problem, though, can be summed up with the fact that the title is entirely inappropriate: Dos Passos did indeed write about three soldiers, but two of them drop away fairly quickly in the course of the novel. Over half of the book focuses on John Andrews and, unfortunately, he is not a strong or compelling enough character to support the textual weight Dos Passos places on his shoulders. Certainly Andrews, an aspiring composer who hates the life of of order and discipline he is forced to endure in the army during the war, is the character that Dos Passos would probably have been most familiar with (in terms of life experience and class situation). But Andrews is such a lazy, whiny, indecisive and, ultimately, weak-willed character that it was a relief to reach the end of the book regardless of what happens to him. Either Dos Passos intended the book to be a strong critique of Andrews's (in some ways default) philosophy of anarchism, or the author could not control his characters and plot enough to clearly let the reader know how to take Andrews's futile attempts to break out of "the mould" of his training. The text is so cluttered and unclear that it's a little difficult to know how to take it. The book is worth reading, but not something I'd keep around to reread (unlike, for example, Dos Passos's brilliant _Manhattan Transfer_ or the grand and ambitious scope of the _USA_ trilogy).
