John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

This was a major disappointment. The USA Trilogy has been in the back of my mind as one of those "I'll read that for sure one of these days" works for 15 years or so. 80 some odd years after its publication it is still mentioned as contender for the Great American Novel. Well, after reading this, the first volume, I don't join that chorus.

Dos Passos famously uses four different modes of writing in this work. The most conventional one, which is the main body of text, follows the youth and adulthood of various characters making their way through early 20th Century America. The characterization is decent, but fundamentally Dos Passos is not interested in these characters as people, but as types, as representatives of the USA. You can give him credit for scope, though if you're admiring of this aspect you should also give him demerits for a complete lack of interest in the experience of non-white Americans, which would seem to be a major flaw in a work aiming to embody the whole experience of USA. These chapters are okay, though nothing exceptional. Worthy of 3 stars.

Taking the book down to 2 stars for me are two experimental, modernist modes of writing, which I view as total failures. The greatest offenders are the "Camera Eye" sections, 27 of them in The 42nd Parallel, in which Dos Passos copies the style of James Joyce in attempting to create a portrait of the author. About a page or two each, bereft of any context or continuity, they are fairly tortuous, if blessedly brief.

The other mode is the Newsreel sections, which mash up and blend popular song lyrics with newspaper headlines and scraps of stories, as if someone with ADD was flipping through a paper while humming a song to himself. Experimental, precursor to TV, window into the mind of the time, blah blah blah.

MOON'S PATENT IS FIZZLE

insurgents win at Kansas polls Oak Park soulmates part 8000 to take autoride says girl begged for her husband

PIT SENTIMENT FAVORS UPTURN

Oh you be-eautiful doll
You great big beautiful doll

Sorry, I'm not gaining anything by this.

The fourth mode is the one I enjoyed the most, brief sketches of famous biographical figures of the time which tend to the witty, irreverent and clever. I quite liked them, though are they necessary or even sensical to include in the novel? Not really.… (mais)

Dated now and with references to people and events that are close to forgotten.
I had read the trilogy "USA" in 1972 and thought it was revolutionary writing and loved its locomotive narrative.
Dos Passos' diaries and letters are worth reading. He comes across as a retiring thoughtful man with a genius for inventive expression and someone keen for experience.
We follow his development from student to volunteer ambulance service in Europe and Army service in World War I. He was a frequent traveller always interested in how the working citizen was being influenced by the mass movements of the first half of the Twentieth Century.
Over a lifetime Dos Passos gave away his socialist beliefs to such an extent that he ended up a Goldwater advocate in 1964. This change was influenced by his ever growing distrust of communism and political "isms".
There is wonderful correspondence with Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Fitzgerald and E.E. Cummings to mention the most well-known.
His life at Harvard, travels in Spain, the Near East and Russia, the USA in the Thirties, the Spanish Civil War (where his disquiet with communism was fully realized) and post World War II are all covered.
He was often in straitened circumstances (the correspondence often shows him requesting a loan of a couple of hundred dollars to tide him over). He suffered ill-heath for decades and tragedy struck when his first wife was killed in a car crash. To the end of his days he remained an affectionate man with a healthy capacity for disbelief in the prevailing discourse.
Each period of his life is provided with an introductory piece by the editor in the form of a biographical narrative.
Good reading.… (mais)