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footnote304's review
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
buddhafish's review
4.0
141st book of 2020.
The U.S.A. Trilogy is comprised of three novels: [b:The 42nd Parallel|7101|The 42nd Parallel (U.S.A., #1)|John Dos Passos|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440885254l/7101._SY75_.jpg|10275] (1930), [b:1919|7104|1919 (U.S.A., #2)|John Dos Passos|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440254386l/7104._SY75_.jpg|933258] (1932) and [b:The Big Money|7103|The Big Money (U.S.A., #3)|John Dos Passos|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398915355l/7103._SY75_.jpg|130564] (1936); Passos wanted the novels to be sold and read as one, so in honour of that, I found a beautiful old copy (from 1937) of the trilogy as one from Everyman Library and began—its total was 1449 pages.
Narrative Mass
Its construction is originally what interested me the most on starting. There are four narrative modes throughout all three books and the chapters shift between them.
Fiction: There are 12 “main” characters throughout the three novels and each have their own chapters, which begin from their childhood and through their lives chronologically. In the first book for example, Eleanor Stoddard has her own chapters appearing, but in the second book, her chapters are gone in the place of Eveline Hutchins, who was a friend and side-character of Stoddard’s. In this way, Stoddard remains in the story, but Passos starts us from Hutchins’ childhood before returning to the present and meeting Stoddard again. Almost all of the characters appear in more than one novel, apart from, I believe, Mac, whose chapters take up the first 100 pages of the first novel, but then he does not appear in subsequent books. All the fiction is written in true free indirect speech style.
“The Camera Eye”: These are usually small intermittent chapters that break up the large fiction parts (along with the later explained “Newsreels” and more rarely, the Biographies). Compared to the style of the Fiction mode, “The Camera Eye” is written in stream of consciousness and sometimes the prose breaks onto new lines for no immediate reason, giving the chapters the look of prose-poetry. These chapters are autobiographical (to be technical, they are a Künstlerroman—a narrative about the growth of an artist); they track Passos life from a child to a writer. The stream of consciousness makes them sometimes unclear, but they are an interesting change of style.
The “Newsreels”: These are perhaps the most strikingly interesting and different chapters of the novel that set it apart: the chapters consist of snippets from newspapers, headlines, song lyrics and other fragments, all from papers of the time, gathered by Passos. The main two papers he sourced them from were the Chicago Tribune and The New York World. The “Newsreels” are one of the main reasons for the Polaroid of the time that Passos creates and one of the features that lends the novel, I believe, into being the great American classic of the 20th century.
Biographies: The least occurring chapters are the short (short for covering a whole life, but considerably longer than the previous two modes) biographies. They appear only several times per novel and cover figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Isadora Duncan, Henry Ford and Thorstein Veblen.
This rather sporadic, manic experimental style drives the novel (U.S.A. is called a “novel”, despite being three novels). It influenced many writers, most notably, [a:Jean-Paul Sartre|1466|Jean-Paul Sartre|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1475567078p2/1466.jpg].
The Pilot Fish
To sum the feel of the novel up I would combine Hemingway’s lost generation in [b:The Sun Also Rises|3876|The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta)|Ernest Hemingway|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509802323l/3876._SY75_.jpg|589497] with the style and feel of Kerouac novels. U.S.A. is, in a way, plotless, for all of its 1449 pages. Characters drift, fall in and out of love, try to get work, travel, fall into doomed love again, get injured, go to War, and come home again. They are the lost generation that Hemingway was also writing about. And Passos and Hemingway were friends, often they are credited as “The Boxer and The Professor”—they met in WWI, both driving ambulances. (Though their friendship eventually declined and Passos was named “the pilot fish” in Hemingway’s memoir [b:A Moveable Feast|4631|A Moveable Feast|Ernest Hemingway|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427463201l/4631._SX50_.jpg|2459084]—which is apparently derogatory.) Though they met briefly in Italy in 1918, they solidified that friendship in Paris, in 1923. Both writers were born in Chicago and both writers would end up being two of the greatest names in American fiction. Passos even married Hemingway’s old “high school crush”. They left one another at a train platform in 1937, no longer friends, after differing opinions, mostly from the Spanish Civil War: Passos, by that time, was being disillusioned with communism and the left-wing side.
Left: Hemingway, Right: Passos.
Huckleberry Finn to Fainy McCreary?
But where does U.S.A. stand in American fiction now? I would say that [b:The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn|2956|The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn|Mark Twain|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546096879l/2956._SX50_.jpg|1835605] is the American classic of the 19th century, possibly with [b:Moby-Dick or, the Whale|153747|Moby-Dick or, the Whale|Herman Melville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327940656l/153747._SY75_.jpg|2409320] fairly close behind. I have a Huckleberry Finn review (here), so don’t need to delve into why I believe that; the question is, why is U.S.A. the staple for the 20th century? [b:The Great Gatsby|4671|The Great Gatsby|F. Scott Fitzgerald|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1490528560l/4671._SY75_.jpg|245494] is a brilliant American novel, and that aside, it’s almost a perfect novel; but where Gatsby captures America in the 20s, it is also only a Polaroid. Passos’ trilogy is more like a film reel. Of course, the trilogy is a doorstop compared to the size of The Great Gatsby, but Passos’ words and reflections, to me, echo further than Fitzgerald’s. I have already likened Passos to Kerouac. Thirty years later Kerouac was writing in the way Passos had before him; his characters (I use that term loosely, as Kerouac’s “characters” were all real people) tackled the same problems as Passos’: they drifted, they travelled, they had doomed love affairs. America was torn by war, money, disillusionment. Passos’ lost characters captures it all as The Sun Also Rises does, but with less bullfighting.
Autobiographical Interlude
I am English, and have been to America just once, in 2014, with my family; I was 17. We toured California for two-weeks, staying in nine (or so) different hotels and motels throughout the state: Los Angeles, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Yosemite, San Francisco, Monterey, and more. I remember a fair amount of the journey but what I remember most is being tired. My brother and I fell asleep frequently in the car and woke up to rolling palm trees, hills, mountains, cities. Every few days we were sleeping in a different bed, sightseeing more, walking miles and miles per week. I remember the giant stuffed heads in our motel in Yosemite in the mountains and the giant layered trees around the hotel, the whales off Route 1 booming out to sea, their tails throwing mountains of seawater into the air, and the raccoons we watched by the restaurants in Monterey, the seals, the waterfalls, the food and the sun.
Yosemite, 2014, Photo by Me.
So, when I read U.S.A. and there was this constant, ever-growing sense of movement, it only reminded me of my own experiences of America (because that’s all I really have): the tired feet, the heat, the motels and the haggardness. And like Kerouac’s prose, Passos’ rolls with such energy: in a single page a character can be married and divorced, years can flash past, the whole war can flash past, they can travel to Mexico and back, they can lose the love of their life, a family member can die, they can change their whole perception of the universe: in a single page one has to remain with full attention so not to miss it, in the same way my parents would call to the back of our car, “Don’t fall asleep, boys, you’ll miss it”—so we opened our eyes again, to gulp down more of America, before inevitably falling asleep again.
The U.S.A. Trilogy is comprised of three novels: [b:The 42nd Parallel|7101|The 42nd Parallel (U.S.A., #1)|John Dos Passos|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440885254l/7101._SY75_.jpg|10275] (1930), [b:1919|7104|1919 (U.S.A., #2)|John Dos Passos|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440254386l/7104._SY75_.jpg|933258] (1932) and [b:The Big Money|7103|The Big Money (U.S.A., #3)|John Dos Passos|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398915355l/7103._SY75_.jpg|130564] (1936); Passos wanted the novels to be sold and read as one, so in honour of that, I found a beautiful old copy (from 1937) of the trilogy as one from Everyman Library and began—its total was 1449 pages.
Narrative Mass
Its construction is originally what interested me the most on starting. There are four narrative modes throughout all three books and the chapters shift between them.
Fiction: There are 12 “main” characters throughout the three novels and each have their own chapters, which begin from their childhood and through their lives chronologically. In the first book for example, Eleanor Stoddard has her own chapters appearing, but in the second book, her chapters are gone in the place of Eveline Hutchins, who was a friend and side-character of Stoddard’s. In this way, Stoddard remains in the story, but Passos starts us from Hutchins’ childhood before returning to the present and meeting Stoddard again. Almost all of the characters appear in more than one novel, apart from, I believe, Mac, whose chapters take up the first 100 pages of the first novel, but then he does not appear in subsequent books. All the fiction is written in true free indirect speech style.
“The Camera Eye”: These are usually small intermittent chapters that break up the large fiction parts (along with the later explained “Newsreels” and more rarely, the Biographies). Compared to the style of the Fiction mode, “The Camera Eye” is written in stream of consciousness and sometimes the prose breaks onto new lines for no immediate reason, giving the chapters the look of prose-poetry. These chapters are autobiographical (to be technical, they are a Künstlerroman—a narrative about the growth of an artist); they track Passos life from a child to a writer. The stream of consciousness makes them sometimes unclear, but they are an interesting change of style.
The “Newsreels”: These are perhaps the most strikingly interesting and different chapters of the novel that set it apart: the chapters consist of snippets from newspapers, headlines, song lyrics and other fragments, all from papers of the time, gathered by Passos. The main two papers he sourced them from were the Chicago Tribune and The New York World. The “Newsreels” are one of the main reasons for the Polaroid of the time that Passos creates and one of the features that lends the novel, I believe, into being the great American classic of the 20th century.
Biographies: The least occurring chapters are the short (short for covering a whole life, but considerably longer than the previous two modes) biographies. They appear only several times per novel and cover figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Isadora Duncan, Henry Ford and Thorstein Veblen.
This rather sporadic, manic experimental style drives the novel (U.S.A. is called a “novel”, despite being three novels). It influenced many writers, most notably, [a:Jean-Paul Sartre|1466|Jean-Paul Sartre|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1475567078p2/1466.jpg].
The Pilot Fish
To sum the feel of the novel up I would combine Hemingway’s lost generation in [b:The Sun Also Rises|3876|The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta)|Ernest Hemingway|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1509802323l/3876._SY75_.jpg|589497] with the style and feel of Kerouac novels. U.S.A. is, in a way, plotless, for all of its 1449 pages. Characters drift, fall in and out of love, try to get work, travel, fall into doomed love again, get injured, go to War, and come home again. They are the lost generation that Hemingway was also writing about. And Passos and Hemingway were friends, often they are credited as “The Boxer and The Professor”—they met in WWI, both driving ambulances. (Though their friendship eventually declined and Passos was named “the pilot fish” in Hemingway’s memoir [b:A Moveable Feast|4631|A Moveable Feast|Ernest Hemingway|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427463201l/4631._SX50_.jpg|2459084]—which is apparently derogatory.) Though they met briefly in Italy in 1918, they solidified that friendship in Paris, in 1923. Both writers were born in Chicago and both writers would end up being two of the greatest names in American fiction. Passos even married Hemingway’s old “high school crush”. They left one another at a train platform in 1937, no longer friends, after differing opinions, mostly from the Spanish Civil War: Passos, by that time, was being disillusioned with communism and the left-wing side.
Left: Hemingway, Right: Passos.
Huckleberry Finn to Fainy McCreary?
But where does U.S.A. stand in American fiction now? I would say that [b:The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn|2956|The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn|Mark Twain|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1546096879l/2956._SX50_.jpg|1835605] is the American classic of the 19th century, possibly with [b:Moby-Dick or, the Whale|153747|Moby-Dick or, the Whale|Herman Melville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327940656l/153747._SY75_.jpg|2409320] fairly close behind. I have a Huckleberry Finn review (here), so don’t need to delve into why I believe that; the question is, why is U.S.A. the staple for the 20th century? [b:The Great Gatsby|4671|The Great Gatsby|F. Scott Fitzgerald|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1490528560l/4671._SY75_.jpg|245494] is a brilliant American novel, and that aside, it’s almost a perfect novel; but where Gatsby captures America in the 20s, it is also only a Polaroid. Passos’ trilogy is more like a film reel. Of course, the trilogy is a doorstop compared to the size of The Great Gatsby, but Passos’ words and reflections, to me, echo further than Fitzgerald’s. I have already likened Passos to Kerouac. Thirty years later Kerouac was writing in the way Passos had before him; his characters (I use that term loosely, as Kerouac’s “characters” were all real people) tackled the same problems as Passos’: they drifted, they travelled, they had doomed love affairs. America was torn by war, money, disillusionment. Passos’ lost characters captures it all as The Sun Also Rises does, but with less bullfighting.
Autobiographical Interlude
I am English, and have been to America just once, in 2014, with my family; I was 17. We toured California for two-weeks, staying in nine (or so) different hotels and motels throughout the state: Los Angeles, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Yosemite, San Francisco, Monterey, and more. I remember a fair amount of the journey but what I remember most is being tired. My brother and I fell asleep frequently in the car and woke up to rolling palm trees, hills, mountains, cities. Every few days we were sleeping in a different bed, sightseeing more, walking miles and miles per week. I remember the giant stuffed heads in our motel in Yosemite in the mountains and the giant layered trees around the hotel, the whales off Route 1 booming out to sea, their tails throwing mountains of seawater into the air, and the raccoons we watched by the restaurants in Monterey, the seals, the waterfalls, the food and the sun.
Yosemite, 2014, Photo by Me.
So, when I read U.S.A. and there was this constant, ever-growing sense of movement, it only reminded me of my own experiences of America (because that’s all I really have): the tired feet, the heat, the motels and the haggardness. And like Kerouac’s prose, Passos’ rolls with such energy: in a single page a character can be married and divorced, years can flash past, the whole war can flash past, they can travel to Mexico and back, they can lose the love of their life, a family member can die, they can change their whole perception of the universe: in a single page one has to remain with full attention so not to miss it, in the same way my parents would call to the back of our car, “Don’t fall asleep, boys, you’ll miss it”—so we opened our eyes again, to gulp down more of America, before inevitably falling asleep again.
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