As you might expect from it’s title, the USA Trilogy is three books, not one, but they are sufficiently interconnected that they really operate as a single novel. If it weren’t for the separate tables of contents and title pages, I wouldn’t have suspected that the book was anything but a single sprawling novel.
And sprawling is the word, for Dos Passos’ work is nothing if not ambitious. Using a varie,d daring style, Dos Passos attempts to capture a period of American history from about 1910 to 1930, with periodic jaunts outside of this scope, both spatial and temporal. Indeed, much of the second book is set in France in the closing days of World War I, where soldiers and army volunteers struggle to transition to peacetime and capitalists seize on the abruptly shifted world order to make a killing.
There are a number of characters, but no clear protagonist, with individual players dropping in and out of the narrative. Characters who are central in one point can be relegated to small parts in other points of view later on, and some are dropped altogether—notably Mac, the young Wobbly who forms the core of the first half of book one before disappearing from the pages and never being spoke of again. If I had to select a main character, I’d pick J Ward Moorehouse, a failed songwriter whose intelligence, craftiness, and upward marriages allow him to build a successful advertising agency. But evem he is only a point of view character in the first book, shifting afterwards to appearances in the story through other eyes.
Interpresed through the main narrative are biographies of notable figures from American history during the period, as well as two more experimental sections: Newsreels, which feature snippets of headlines, news stories, and song lyrics crosscutting in a disorienting fashion, sometimes mid-sentences, and “The Camera Eye,” in which stories of unrelated and largely anonymous characters are told in a dizzy stream of conscious style.
The book isn’t an easy one to follow, and even without large breaks between readings, I often forgot who was who and what individual characters had done in prior installments. Still, the writing feels fresh even 90 years later, the characters speak with rich, developed voices, and the story carries an undeniable sense of verisimilitude. Dos Passos captures small things, and magpies them together into a towering narrative.