My sympathies lie with the private in the front line against the brass hat; with the hodcarrier against
    the strawboss, or the walking delegate for that matter; with the laboratory worker against the
    stuffed shirt in a mortarboard; with the criminal against the cop.
            -John Dos Passos

This is my last review for the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century.  I intentionally left this one for last because I've tried reading the trilogy before and, quite honestly, find it one of the most putdownable books on God's green Earth.  Dos Passos uses a variety of techniques to try to capture the panoramic sweep of America early in the Century,  including inserting short biographies of historical figures like Eugene V. Debs and pasting in actual newspaper headlines.  But between these continual interruptions and the sheer number of characters and storylines he pursues, it is a story that becomes horribly segmented and jerks to a halt whenever its building up some momentum.  There are some excellent set pieces and some of the interludes are pretty interesting, but the whole work does not really flow to well.  Stylistically, it is an experiment that goes awry.

However, Dos Passos real importance is not as a stylist.  Instead, it is the way in which his career arc tracks that of Western Man over the course of the Century.  In many ways he is the American Orwell (see review of  Homage to Catalonia).  At the start of the trilogy Dos Passos is an angry young man, dreaming of the paradise that will arise when the "Workers of the World Unite", railing against Big Business, etc.  But he gradually realized that the organized workers were merely another big bureaucracy, and he loathed institutions of whatever stripe.  He also received a rude awakening during the Spanish Civil War when his friend Jose Robles was arrested and murdered by Stalinists.  In a conversation with his wife and Hemingway he threatened to return to the United States and tell the truth about the situation in Spain.  Hemingway warned him that if he did the critics would "bury" him.  To which Mrs. Dos Passos responded:  "Ernest, I never heard anything so despicably opportunistic in my life".

This began a long drift to the right which did in fact result in the critics dismissing his later works and by the time of the Vietnam War, which he supported, he was viewed as a reactionary hack.  We see the first inklings of this political shift in the final sections of the trilogy as the tone becomes increasingly pessimistic as regards "the Movement", with scenes of Party infighting and the increasing impression that the very individuals and organizations that started out to improve the lot of the working man will now be merely another source of oppression.

On balance then we end up with a book that doesn't truly succeed but which is emblematic of the times.  It almost has to be on the list, but I advise skimming.

(Reviewed:11-Jan-00)

Grade: (C) Orrin C. Judd

Tweet