The 42nd Parallel

When I first came across John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money) as a teenager I thought they were the most exciting books I'd read to date. I was enthralled by its scope, its style, and its highly politicized substance. Dos Passos' montage-style (that seemed to be some sort of homage to the great Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein) mixed interwoven story lines of fictional characters with brief contemporary biographies of famous contemporaries. To that he added "newsreel" items, brief inserts from news clippings of the day that gave some sense of the cultural and political world these characters inhabited. Last, Dos Passos added subjective, autobiographical snippets (the "Camera Eye") that served as some sort of exterior voice of the author. I was concerned when I picked up 42nd Parallel many years later that I would find that my excitement was more the product of teenage naivete than from reading a truly unique literary work. Happily, I was not disappointed to find that the USA Trilogy remains for me, a wonderful piece of writing, one that has fallen inexplicably out of the American literary cannon. Seventy years later we think of American fiction from the 1920s and 1930s as being dominated by three writers, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. It is not much remembered that at the time Dos Passos was thought of as an essential fourth. When 42nd Parallel was published Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Upon publication of The Big Money in 1936 Dos Passos made the cover of the August 10, 1936 issue of Time Magazine. 42nd Parallel is a wonderful title for Volume I of the Trilogy. The 42nd Parallel of latitude runs right through the heart of the USA. Starting from the west it forms the north/south boundary of California, Nevada and part of Utah from Oregon and Idaho. Running east it crosses Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and the New York/Pennsylvania border. After cutting across Connecticut it reaches the Atlantic Ocean just where the Pilgrims landed, at Plymouth Rock. Dos Passos' 42nd Parallel cuts a similar swath across the USA. Set roughly in the years from 1900 to the First World War, Dos Passos traces the lives of five characters, each from a different part of the country and each with a different class and cultural background. We are presented with the stories of Fainy McCreary (Mac), Janey, J. Ward Moorehouse, Eleanor Stoddard, and Charley Anderson. As the stories progress they converge (personally or geographically) and diverge sometimes as randomly as two ships passing in the night. We have a range of characters from a card carrying member of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies) in Mac to a budding man of wealth and importance in the new field of public relations (Moore

"The 42nd Parallel," the first volume of John Dos Passos's "U.S.A." trilogy, is a novel about America and Americans from the 1890s up to the first World War. That sounds ordinary enough, but "The 42nd Parallel"--the title possibly refers to the latitude of Chicago, Dos Passos's city of birth and where a good portion of the action of the novel takes place--is notable more for its style than for its content, not that the latter is uninteresting. Dos Passos invents five young people from different backgrounds and parts of the country and follows the courses of their lives until their destinies eventually intersect. The first to be introduced is a poor kid from Connecticut by way of Chicago named Fenian "Mac" McCreary who, starting out as an apprentice printer not unlike Benjamin Franklin, travels from city to city hopping trains and falling haplessly into a variety of odd jobs--assisting a con man, writing propaganda for a labor organization--until he ends up in Mexico running a bookstore on the fringe of a revolutionary movement. Then we meet Janey Williams, a middle-class girl from Washington, D.C., who makes a living as a stenographer while she is looking for a husband. Next is a diligent, intelligent boy from Wilmington, Delaware, named J. Ward Moorehouse who after some bad luck in his career and his marriage becomes a successful public relations consultant for corporations. Eleanor Stoddard, a Chicago girl who dreams of a fashionable and cultured life for herself, breaks the social and economic barriers and becomes a highly reputable interior decorator in New York. Finally, Charley Anderson, a North Dakota native, struggles to find and keep work as a mechanic while he roams the country as a vagrant, ultimately volunteering for the ambulance corps in France as the United States enters the European war. What all these people have in common is that they each epitomize some facet of the new American socioeconomic picture of the emerging twentieth century--the socialist, the working single girl, the corporate image softener. The novel reflects the changes America was undergoing at the time, especially in light of the problematic relations between labor, industry, and government, and the country's potential position as a new global superpower awaiting the biggest, bloodiest war the world would witness to date. Dos Passos wrote this in 1930, so of course he had the benefit of some hindsight; there was no second world war, nor even yet the threat of one, to obscure his vision of the era. The narratives of the main characters alternate with "Newsreels" that provide glimpses of contemporary events, headlines, and snippets of popular songs; sections called "The Camera Eye" which record random prattle from snapshot subjects and look like modernist prose poems; and brief versified sketches of actual personalities and prominent figures of the day who shaped American history, from Eugene V. Debs to Thomas Edison to Charles Proteus Ste

To read John Dos Passos' "The 42ND Parallel" is a unique reading experience that I highly recommend, though not to everybody. It is a great book, but very intellectual, slow and sometimes confusing --therefore it requires a lot of concentration from the reader. But those who adventure this superb work are likely to be very pleased. This is a great portrait of the USA circa 1900 --a remarkable read. To begin with, the format of the story can be a major drawback. Not only is it segmented, but also, from time to time, sections that haven't much to do with the narrative itself pop up. Sections named "Newsreel" and "Camera Eye" may not make the main narrative --or narratives --move on, but they are important to set the mood and give historical background to the reader. They can put off the reader, or helpful, it only depends on how much one likes historical context. Each main character is a book itself. They have long stories that are told from the beginning. Each one has his or her main conflicts, supporting characters and so forth. But the closer we get to the end, the clearer it is that all the storylines will get together in the end. And this is one of the biggest accomplishments of Dos Passos. Many writers try to do this kind of device and fail --they are neither convincer, nor surprising. But this is not the case in "The 42ND Parallel". You may have a feeling the narratives will eventually meet each other in the end, but the end is so engaging that surprises us. Since "The 42ND Parallel" is the first installment of a trilogy, clearly, it has no ending so to speak. The narratives come to a finale, but still there is water to pass under the bridge. The last paragraph is the perfect hook for the next novel. It leaves the reader with a natural excitement to read "1919".

There is great vitality in this novel; mirroring the hungry droves of Americans crossing their lands, entering into others and landing in the midst of the embattled end of European monarchies. World War I. Great may not be the correct adjective, as so much of this leap involved the dark side of capitalism, imperialism and the hegemony of the corporate state over the common individual.There is plenty of sex, scandal and people being less than ideal- there is also a fascinating running panorama of the names of history lessons, made real and woven into the plot which is nothing less than epochal. We find Debs, Edison, the Molly Maguires, the Czar, Wilson- they are vividly real and for that alone, dos Passos has produced a invaluable addition to the purely American literature that is evocative and chillingly foreshadowing of the state of affairs visited upon this nation and the rest of the world in 2003. I will wait a while before the next book in this trilogy, but not too long.

It took me a bit to get into the flow of the novel. There are three levels of narrative in the book, and two of them - The Camera Eye and Newsreel - are positively Joycean. On top of that, the narratives about individual characters - the most detailed of the three levels - are written so that once you get to know a character, Dos Passos introduces a new character (there are 4 total) in a new narrative. It can be a little exhausting at times.Once I got past that, the richness of the language and brilliance of the story became evident. His style is simple, somewhat similar to Steinbeck's, and reflects the "common man" quality of the people he has created. But his scope is far greater than that of any of his contemporaries. It is truly a work of genius. Dos Passos, through 1000 pages (of all 3 volumes) and a dozen main characters, has managed to accruately tell the story of a coming-of-age United States in a human, compelling way.