And my thoughts on the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos. I've briefly touched on The 42nd Parallel and 1919 already. This final installment was published in 1933.
I've been trying to think of how to summarize 1200 pages of novel and the best I have is, "The US and some other places from shortly before WWI, until shortly before WWII". Yeah, it's not a great summary. There's just too much novel to summarize.
The format of the novels was a big part of the storytelling. Each book is comprised of unequal numbers of four types of chapter:
Main storytelling sections focusing on an individual character (but often intersecting with other main characters)
Biopics of important people of the times (presidents, leaders of industry, etc) written in open verse
stream-of-consciousness views through unidentified people's eyes
collections of headlines and random phrases from newspapers or newsreels
Each of these is arranged in such a way as to lead from topic to topic. For example, there is a biopic of an actress right before he introduces a new character who is, as expected, an actress. It's not always this obvious but upon reflection they do all go together. Sometimes the headlines tell you what happened to a character or a place after the end of the previous chapter. Sometimes they only suggest. Sometimes the stream-of-consciousness section gives you the view of someone experiencing the events of the chapter, and sometimes they give you the view of an opposing side or a witness to the main events. (For example, after a chapter about an ambulance driver in WWI, the next stream-of-consciousness section was from the POV of an injured soldier).
There are things I liked quite a bit and things I really didn't like at all:
+ Each character is well developed and rounded, an entire person, who may pop back up much later in the novel and in time.
- There are a lot of characters, and often a long time passes between each appearance. Also, he writes about some of them from birth, giving you much more detail than you could ever want or need (in one case, just to kill the character off and break your heart).
+ He obviously followed world events very closely and researched thoroughly.
- The novels are around 100 years old and some of the slang and references were hard to understand. In particular, every racial and ethnic group is referred to by slur. I learnt a lot of bad words reading this.
+ The settings followed characters not just in the USA but in Europe as well as Mexico, Central, and South America.
- He not only wrote in foreign languages but often wrote them phonetically, making translation almost impossible. He was particularly cruel in his Spanish spellings (I can read Spanish, and I couldn't make out what words he thought he was using.)
+ The events, characters, and interactions came off as very realistic and lifelike.
- Almost every person in this trilogy was an awful person. Also, people drank and smoked WAY too much!
+ The overall themes of the novels carried through from the very beginning to the end, in particular the movement for worker's rights and social supports. Dos Passos had a very strong social conscience.
- Again, he uses a lot of slang and acronyms and stuff and it isn't always clear what he is talking about. Even knowing a lot of period history, I had to look things up regularly.
In all, there were parts of this that were hard to read, and parts that were hard to put down. I cannot believe the way women were treated back then. It blows my mind. Like, I know, factually, but seeing the day to day lives of women was awful in a lot of cases.
Length: 1, 240 pages in hardback
ReReadability: this is a LOT of novel and I feel like I will be digesting it for a long time. I may eventually read it again
Classic: one of the most "classic" of all classics.
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