The 42nd Parallel

The 42d Parallel by John Dos Passos (USA Trilogy)

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I first discovered John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy back in 1978 during my first semester at UC Davis. I picked up the trilogy, and read about halfway through the first book “The 42d Parallel” and then got distracted. I have always meant to finish the book and the trilogy.

This is not an indictment of the book. Even at 18, I was floored by the poetry of the autobiographical vignettes that Dos Passos sprinkles throughout the book. He introduces the readers to the great men of the early 20th century - Debs, Steinmetz, Edison, Fighting Bob LaFollette and others - many of whom we remember, but most of whom are forgotten. In a few short pages, he brings the essence of those men back to life. It was enough to induce me to buy the Library of Congress edition thirty years later.

The sense of the book that Debs meant to communicate was that the 20th century was an onrushing era of energy and change - the first moment of “future shock” before that phrase was coined. Thus, like T.S. Elliot's “The Waste Land”, the story is fractured and kaleidoscopic, told from different perspectives, often with quick changes in perspective. Thus, along with the biographical stories, Dos Passos fractures the story with “Newsreel” sections - headlines from news stories of the time - and “Camera Eye” sections - which seem to be autobiographical memoirs from the author. The story is told from the perspective of five characters - in this book; more to come in the later books - who are picked up and dropped at various points in their lives. The stories are separate, but the characters can overlap. For example, later in the book, focal character Charlie meets the brother of a friend of focal character Janie.

So, this is not a book with an easily described plot line, and that is the point. This is literature, which is about characters and not about plot. The characters we get are not particular appealing; they seem to be on the make or quite willing to leave wives and children behind. That's probably the point, also; they are typical, every-men and every-women experiencing the changing world.

In many ways, I think that waiting forty years made me appreciate the book more than my 18 year old self could have appreciated it. I loved the historical elements - the pre-WW I phrases and attitudes and expectation, and the sense of being there at that time. We see, for example, the fact that many Americans were pro-German and that the issue of Socialism was quite alive at this time.

The 18-year-old me, however, did recognize something - namely, that John Brunner's Hugo-award winning “Stand on Zanzibar” was patterned on the USA trilogy, complete with multiple - although only two - focal characters, imaginary headlines of the then near future, excerpts from Chad C. Mulligan's writings, all of which was intended to do what Dos Passos had done, 30 years before, i.e., communicate “future shock.”

I listened to a portion of this book as an audiobook, which actually improved the reading. Dos Passos writes in an indirect free-style that picks up on the slang and mannerism of the character he is following at the time. The narrator did a great job of communicating that aspect of Dos Passos' writing, which I might have been missing in my reading. Likewise, I had a tendency to skim the “Camera Eye” sections, but having a narrator slow me down and pay attention to the entire section, before rushing on to the next part of the story, paid dividends. Finally, the narrator brought out ironies that I was not picking up in the “Newsreel” sections. If nothing else, the narrator gave me a clue to how to better appreciate this fine book.