23. U.S.A.: The Big Money by John Dos Passos

As per usual, the fact that this is a sequel means that there's a good chance this review contains a ton of spoilers. -M.R.

Year Published: 1936
Pages: 483
First Sentence: Charley Anderson lay in his bunk in a glary red buzz.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
I'm going to try to avoid it, but this may end up turning into a review of the whole U.S.A. trilogy sooner rather than later.

The Big Money is the final book in John Dos Passos' trilogy, which started out strong but that I wasn't able to maintain my patience for. The book is in the same format as the previous two, with "Camera Eyes," "Newsreels," prose poem profiles, and narratives from the perspective of several characters. It is very explicitly about its title, the Big Money, and the enormous forces of capitalism in shaping post-WWI America.

The characters we follow this time are two that we've encountered before and two new ones:

• Charley Anderson, WWI flying ace who goes into business to build planes and goes off the rails at the same time.
• Mary French, one of the new characters, a young woman who begins college and ends up becoming a journalist and labour activist.
• Margo Dowling, who begins life being adopted by her dead mother's best friend and ends up as a famous actress, the other new character.
• Richard Ellsworth Savage, my old least favourite, now working in public relations for an aging J. Ward Morehouse.

The two female characters in this book were quite fun and/or interesting to spend time with. Mary's the kind of person who's so committed to her cause that she makes you feel ashamed for not having the guts and conviction to follow her lead. Margo has been chewed up and spit out by the world she lives in, and keeps rising from the ashes through a combination of determination and luck.

Having spent what felt like a lot of time already with the male characters, though, it was hard to sustain any interest in their stories. Charley Anderson ends up being a wealthy brute (though honestly his arc is pretty good when considered in a macro sense, not distributed over a hundred pages) and Dick Savage is still boring.

The biggest problem is that, having read the two prior books in the trilogy, I knew that this was all going to just drop off into mystery. It's hard to stay invested in characters that the book itself isn't that invested in. This may be realistic, but I don't find it to be great when it comes to readability, entertainment, and, dare I say, memorability.

Because that's the biggest problem with this trilogy. I spent over two straight months reading it practically every single day, and I can barely remember a single thing in it outside of the prose poem profiles of historical figures that I enjoyed so much. I'm left with a vague sense of the universality of injustice and inequality and the violence and urgency of the early labour movement and the greed and nepotism and amorality of the people at the top and maybe that's the point? But how long will that sense stay with me? We'll see.

In that respect and several others, it's hard not to compare U.S.A. to the Studs Lonigan trilogy. I read them both in nice bound editions of all three books together, with onionskin paper pages. I spent a lot of time with them both. They're set around the same time. But Studs Lonigan and U.S.A. have very different scopes, it's right there in the titles. And yet Studs Lonigan, being specific about one man in one city does a lot more to develop a sense of a place and time and world. U.S.A., in its ambition, just doesn't deliver on its title.

It's possible, of course, that I'm getting unjustly hung up on that title. Dos Passos is successful when it comes to the struggle between capital and humanity (though 1919 is a mess). He's not showing us the whole USA, though. There are no immigrant stories featured in the trilogy (Mac only semi-qualifies, others are just alluded to). There are no rural stories. There are no African American stories.

The fact is that those stories probably weren't on Dos Passos' or his readers' radar in the early to mid 1930s, whereas now we're finally clamouring to hear them. I wonder if I'd read this trilogy even five years early, if I'd've noticed the lack of those voices.

Certainly I still would've found it boring back then. I enjoyed the first book well enough, was still curious at the end of the second, and then, when the book was overdue at the library with no renewals left, and I was 120 pages from the end, I nearly abandoned the whole thing.

So, Dos Passos' reach exceeded his grasp.

Nevertheless, I hope that someday some brilliant person attempts this same project for the early 21st century. They will need far more than a trilogy, and they may not be successful either, but I think it's a worthwhile enterprise.

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Here I am pulling a boner the first thing, she thought.

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23. U.S.A.: 1919 by John Dos Passos

As per usual, the fact that this is a sequel means that there's a good chance this review contains a ton of spoilers. -M.R.

Year Published: 1932
Pages: 413
First Sentence:
Oh the infantree the infantree
With the dirt behind their ears.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
I'm a bit surprised that anyone manages to get past the second book of a trilogy at all. So often, second books are just sort of there, not as impressive as either the introduction or the conclusion. John Dos Passos' second book in the U.S.A. trilogy, 1919, suffers from this problem. It was at least good enough to keep me interested in the third book, but not much better than that.

And of course, as is typical when I review multiple books in a trilogy or series, expect some spoilers ahead.

So, 1919 has the same format as The 42nd Parallel, which is to say there are four modes/formats of storytelling: "Camera Eyes," "Newsreels," prose poem historical character profiles, and narratives about several characters. There still isn't a specific plot, more a circling of characters around the First World War. For a book about the U.S.A., a surprising majority of this one is set in France and a handful of other European locations.

The crop of characters in this book is new, though adjacent to those from the first book:

• Joe Williams (brother to Janey Williams), a sailor who has deserted the Navy and is generally adrift in all sorts of ways, both literal and metaphorical. The character most prone to high levels of racism.
• Richard Ellsworth Savage, originally from Oak Park, Illinois and other than that I read probably a hundred pages about this character and never got a good handle on him. He likes poetry and I was pretty sure he was gay but later events in the novel made me doubt that assessment.
• Eveline Hutchins (friend of Eleanor Stoddard), a Chicago native who seems to drift around either taking care of family members or trying out various business ventures. Her presence recontextualizes the character of Eleanor in interesting ways, to the point where it's hard to be sure which of them is the frivolous one, because they each see each other that way but not, of course, themselves.
• "Daughter" Anne Elizabeth Trent, a Texas belle who gets treated very badly by this book. She dabbles briefly in the labour movement then ends up in France with literally everyone else, Dick Savage gets her pregnant, and then she dies in a plane crash. The desperation of being a woman, ladies and gentlemen.
• Ben Compton, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who manages to squander (?) all his promise by getting involved in the labour movement and then promptly thrown in jail.

In case it's not obvious, I had a really hard time with the characters this time, which sucks because the whole novel depends on the reader's interest in these characters, even if they aren't likeable. Dick Savage's sections, in particular, felt endless. And Joe Williams' racism makes it even more noticeable that although this novel and trilogy purport to be about the whole American experience, the characters are almost exclusively WASPs.

Still, there's something special enough going on here that I want to read the final book. The second to last prose poem section, "Paul Bunyan," is a total gut punch. It's about Wesley Everest, wobbly, WWI veteran, and lynching victim. I have a feeling that this is intended to set the tone for the third and final book, The Big Money.

23. U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos

Year Published: 1930
Pages: 392
First Sentence:
It was that emancipated race
That was chargin up the hill
Up to where them insurrectos
Was afightin to kill
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:
I really didn't know what to expect from The 42nd Parallel, the first book of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy. Knowing me, you'll know I'm already just a tiny bit irritated by that title, being a Canadian. There's a nice author introduction to the edition I have, which assembles all three books in one volume, and it got me on board. Here it is so you can get on board with me:

U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world's greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U. S. A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people.

Still, I was frustrated at the outset, thinking that I might be in for a retread of Studs Lonigan, when the first character I encountered was Irish-American working stiff "Mac," aka Fenian McCreary. Lucky for me, the scope of U.S.A. is much greater, as the name implies.

There's not exactly a plot. The book is about scope, in a way, capturing the early 20th century American experience from a variety of (albeit exclusively white) characters' perspectives. Dos Passos features five different characters: the aforementioned Mac, who lives on the bum for a while and eventually ends up in the labour movement; Janey Williams, who grows up in Washington, DC, and becomes an office worker; J. Ward Moorehouse, social climber from Delaware who sort of invents public relations; Eleanor Stoddard, an aspiring artist in Chicago, and Charley Anderson, a boy in North Dakota. As the book goes on, the characters' stories converge.

There are four different modes in the book, which for me at least was an excellent way of maintaining interest through a rambling narrative. The bulk of the book is the stories of the characters above, with slightly different styles for each. Next there are "Camera Eye" sections, featuring stream-of-consciousness writing from the author's life. I actually could've done without these because they're mostly nonsense. More appealing are the "Newsreel" sections, in which headlines, lead lines, and bits of song or poetry are all squashed together in a jumble. (The first sentence of the book comes from a "Newsreel.") And finally, there are brief profiles of famous people of the time, written as prose poems, which were maybe my favourite parts of the book.

I really liked all of the characters, including the ones I hated. I admire how sprawling this project is. At the end of the book, the Americans have just joined the rest of the world in the Great War. I do have a feeling that this will be more notable as part of the whole, so I'm interested to see what happens next.

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Eleanor was always trying to get a word in alone with Eveline; and the fact that Maurice didn't like Eveline the way Eveline liked him made Eveline very unhappy, but Maurice and Eric seemed to be thoroughly happy. They slept in the same bed and were always together. Eleanor used to wonder about them sometimes but it was so nice to know boys who weren't horrid about women.

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