I've just finished 1919, the second installment in the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos, whose unusual family story I described here. The novels are long--the whole trilogy is printed in this Modern Library volume I picked up somewhere, and it comes in at 1,453 pages. The work is divided into sections, like chapters, headed by the name of the main character whose story is featured in that segment. Then you get to another section, a different character, the story seemingly unconnected to that of the preceding section. And then another, and another. In time, over the sprawl of the book, some of the stories get linked: characters meet, become involved in each others' lives for awhile, separate, may or may not be heard from again. The reader thus has the occasional experience of observing someone known intimately from another section performing as an extra in a different character's story. These longer sections of prose narrative are separated by pastiches of newspaper headlines and articles, under the heading of "Newsreel," as well as sections called "The Camera Eye" and mini biographies of famous Americans who lived during the period of time--first couple decades of the last century-- in which the action is set. The word "kaleidoscopic" inevitably recurs in descriptions of the effect, though if you are less favorably impressed you might incline toward, say, "disjointed." In his later years Dos Passos turned to painting, and one senses that USA is to some considerable degree a novelistic version of certain then-recent developments in the visual arts, such as impressionism and cubism.
To me, these intervening sections of newsreels, etc., are often annoying or even incomprehensible: The Camera Eye sections, for instance, are told in a stream-of consciousness flow that's either hard or impossible to comprehend--so eager have I been to press ahead in order to get to the "regular stories" that I couldn't render an opinion about what a more careful reader might discover about The Camera Eye. Just the phrase itself, which suggests a rotating lens taking in impressions without any intelligent selection principle, indicates what the reader is up against. I suspect the object is to deliver an indelible "impression" of the USA but the impression I often have is of an arch author showing off as he moves from the pummel horse to the rings to the high bar in the gymnasium of modernistic exercises. Occasionally, however, as in a portion of Newsreel XLI from near the conclusion to 1919, his aim is realized:
his reply was an order to his followers to hang these two lads on the spot. They were placed on chairs under trees, halters fastened on the boughs were placed around their necks, and then they were maltreated until they pushed the chair away from them with their feet in order to finish their torments.
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