1919: Volume Two of the U.S.A. Trilogy

Rating:
Summary: Was the effort worth it?
Review: "1919" is the sequel to "42nd Parallel", and takes Dos Passos's examination of early twentieth century America on to World War One. In fact, considering that this book is part two of the "USA" trilogy, it might seem strange that remarkably little of it is set in America.

Told in the same picaresque style as "42nd Parallel", with "The Camera Eye" and "Newsreel" sequences, most of the action takes place in England, France, Italy and a variety of other countries: for example, there's a section devoted to volunteer ambulance drivers in France and Italy which reminded me of Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" (although Dos Passos's account is far better).

It could be argued that the location of the plot is not as important as the characters' attitudes to the war and America's role in it, and the post-war "settlement". Dos Passos's characters experience the futility and waste of war, culminating in the superb ending of "Newsreel 43/The Body of an American".

It seemed to me that Dos Passos was saying that for America, World War One was a double-edged sword in that (except for those who objected to US involvement on various grounds) it masked the socio-economic divisions in the country under a patina of patriotism. But it also heightened such tensions, both directly as the fighting men expected to return to a home in which their sacrifices would be rewarded, and indirectly through the revolutionary example set by events in Russia.

"1919" is a pessimistic novel, in that Dos Passos seems to state that the self-sacrifices were not really acknowledged, and the world did not turn out to be a more just or peaceful place. This extended to the personal level - none of the relationships between the characters in the novel really work - most end in bitter disappointment, and in the early parts of the novel sex is often experienced by way of unwelcome harassment.

G Rodgers

Rating:
Summary: Breathless, fascinating ride loses steam towards the end
Review: 1919 follows several more or less powerless Americans up to and through America's involvement in the war and beyond, as fate and their immediate desires push them around the globe. The novel may have a reputation for being experimental, but this arises more from its structure than its readability: long stretches of conventional narrative in a breezy, modern voice are broken up by biographies of significant figures (Roosevelt, Wilson and heroes of the US labor movement), by "Newsreel" collages of press reports, and (least successfully) by "The Camera Eye" -- an ongoing interior monologue of an unnamed extra character, separate from the main stories, also caught up in the horror of the war.

Dos Passos's writing is fluid, transparent, and saturated with detail; the detail is reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis, but the novel moves at ten times the pace, overwhelming itself with the desire to show you new things. In some ways it reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" more than any contemporary novel in its ambition to say something about almost everything, to squeeze as much as possible in. The description of Cambridge, MA was so pitch-perfect that I believe utterly in his descriptions of everywhere else, Genoa and Paris and Liverpool and Buenos Aires.

The places are great; the incidents are great; what lets the novel down is the people. Almost all of the characters are well-intentioned but not self-aware, driven by impulse, smart and observant but passive and impotent. They seem to deliberately seek out experiences to distract themselves from serious thought about what's going on; even those who do engage end up unable to make a difference (like the Socialist agitator towards the end of the book, going to jail on his twenty-third birthday). Although the biographies engage emotionally with their subjects, you find yourself wishing for the bluff, genial detachment of the main narrative to break into real anger or real passion; the war and the great events surrounding it seem no more or less consequential than a decision to take a train ride or an unsatisfactory one-night stand in a port town. Other reviewers read this as bitterness, a condemnation of the war for being yet another distraction dreamed up by the ruling classes. To me it reads more like an expression of powerlessness, a huge shrug of the shoulders, a feeling that no-one can do any more in the face of history.

Nevertheless, this is a great achievement; a documentary-like attempt to show the world as it is, with no romance or sentimentality clouding the view. If possible, try to get a copy with the original illustrations, which add a huge amount of flavor.

Rating:
Summary: What it Probably was Really Like
Review: 1919 is John Dos Passos' second novel in the U.S.A. trilogy which takes place during World War I. Dos Passos masterfully intersperses biographies of personages of the time with fictitious characters-idealists, profiteers, and those simply caught in the middle of it all-who sometimes cross each others' paths in the confusion.
The Camera Eye and Newsreel present snippets of headlines and popular songs, as do Dos Passos' own illustrations. Some of this has not aged well since 1932, the date of publication. All but the most illustrious people have been forgotten, as well as many of the events surrounding the war.
The strength of 1919 is that it seems to capture the mood of the period through use of "real" speech, the reporting of quotidian conversations and banal concerns, a device far more effective than a historicized than the characters discussing Marxist dialectics in the middle of the trenches. The characters of 1919 are concerned with making it home alive while perhaps learning something about themselves and their country's position in the new century.


Rating:
Summary: What is all the fuss about?
Review: I was prompted to read this book (and many others by the author) by an Amazon.com reviewer of Norman Mailer's 'The Naked and the Dead.' The reviewer completely trashed the Mailer World War II book, which I always believed was as good a war novel that had ever been written. The 'Naked and the Dead' was a groundbreaker in many ways, and set the tone for his great literary career that has ultimately had some ups and admittable downs. The reviewer said that if I want to see some 'real writing', to read John Dos Passos.

So in a way, this is more for the reviewer than anyone else. Even with all the interesting bells and whistles (the use of newsreels in the form of verse and even bleeping out his own cursewords, s______t or f________g, gee what are we three years old now!), '1919' is an outright snorefest. I challenge you to get past the first twnty pages without hitting your head as you fall down in despairing boredom. Please, do all of yourselves a favor and stick with the real deal, Norman Mailer.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing what a little focus can do
Review: The first book of this series, 42nd parallel was simply amazing in the crosscutting technique mixing it up with news clippings and stream of consciousness rantings but in this book does Dos Passos finally find his real voice in his fury at "Mr Wilson's War". His hatred for the war crackles through every page, every sentence is filled with a fury that can't be described, he knows the war was wrong and he knows exactly why and with the patience of a master he sits there and points each of his ideas out and sets it before you and in the end you don't know what to do. The book is more intense than anything I've read before, pages just fly past as the character histories pile up, as the Newsreels and Camera Eyes (definitely at their best here, as he tells his own WWI experiences) flip past each other from one to the other with dizzying speed where you find yourself immsered in a world which you (probably) never knew. For once the workers rights stuff is pushed to the side, showing up mostly toward the end and the last fifty or so pages of the book are breathtakingly brilliant finally hitting the climax with the prosepoem "Body of an American" Dos Passos' own biography of the Unknown Soldier, standing for every American that died for his country without ever really know what he was dying for. The rage and the passion here alone makes it one of the best books of the century and a definite forgotten masterpiece, and coupled with his lyrical prose and sense of characterization you have something that is better than any history book, even if it makes no pretense of being objective and makes the reader think. Don't let this series be forgotten!

Rating:
Summary: Where Are the Reginald Marsh Drawings?
Review: The one star is not meant as a review of the novel itself (USA is one of the top ten works of 20th Century American fiction) but as a review of this terrible edition, which leaves out the Reginald Marsh drawings. Those drawings comprise an essential part of the text, and you miss out on the whole Dos Passos experience without them.