U.S.A. (1930-1936)

John Dos Passos's masterpiece is billed as a trilogy—consisting of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), published separately—but it was intended and is best taken as a single work, though any one of the novels gives the basic idea. The same eccentric structure is used in them all. Sections called Newsreel string together headlines, snippets of song lyrics, and other flotsam of popular culture. Sections called The Camera Eye take interior, stream-of-consciousness views and are often difficult to parse. Still other sections offer poetically compressed biographies of key historical figures: Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Eugene Debs, Thorstein Veblen, many others. But the great majority of U.S.A. consists of the stories of a sprawling cast of characters, who appear in one novel and reappear in another, or maybe disappear altogether, and often intersect with one another. It's a clinic in social realism. Altogether it is the story of the US in the first 30 years of the 20th century: the tail end of the Gilded Age meeting the headwinds of Progressivism, followed by war and other financial insanities. It's big, it's ambitious, and it works. It should be included in all discussions of great American novels, as it could well be the very best. There isn't enough about the women's movement of the time, specifically suffrage, nor about the 1918 flu pandemic, which did away with an estimated 3% to 5% of the world's population, but now I'm quibbling. U.S.A. is mostly focused on the struggle between capital and labor, as big as anything in that time. It tracks the rise of the modern public relations business and its use as propaganda. None of its characters is entirely innocent and no one is entirely guilty. Most of them drink too much, show loose morals, can't keep it together. "It's a good life if you don't weaken" they say to one another. But of course we all weaken and we all know we do too. Writing in the depths of the Depression in the 1930s, Dos Passos seemed sanguine about the fate of the struggle. The '30s were not good times for bankers either, many of them set back on their heels good and hard. And Russia could still be taken as a bright light, though it was beginning to dim with Stalin. You can never be optimistic about capital and labor, not least because the conflict has run for centuries, but Dos Passos might have felt generous toward the at least temporarily vanquished forces of conservatism. That overconfidence did not serve his values well in the long run, as the rise of Reagan happened 10 years after Dos Passos's death, but the equanimity does provide a nice balancing element that benefits this work a good deal. The capitalists in U.S.A. have human sides, and labor is not without its flaws. Mostly, this is one of the most American things I know. Essential.

In case it's not at the library.