THE AMERICA OF JOHN DOS PASSOS
Lionel Trilling
U. S. A.
is far more impressive than even its three impressive
parts-42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money--might
have led one to
expect.* It stands as the important American novel of the decade, on
the whole more satisfying than anything else we have. It lacks any
touch of eccentricity; it is startlingly normal; at the risk of seeming
paradoxical one might say that it is exciting because of its quality of
cliche: here are comprised the judgments about modern American
life that many of us have been living on for years.
Yet too much must not be claimed for this book. To-day we are
inclined to make literature too important, to estimate the writer's
function at an impossibly high rate, to believe that he can encompass
and resolve all the contradictions, and to demand that he should. We
forget that, by reason of his human nature, he is likely to win the
intense perception of a single truth at the cost of a relative blindness
to other truths. We expect a single man to give us all the answers
and produce the "synthesis." And then when the writer, hailed for
giving us much, is discovered to have given us less than everything,
we turn from him in a reaction of disappointment: he has given us
nothing. A great deal has been claimed for Dos Passos and it is im–
portant, now that
U. S. A.
is completed, to mark off the boundaries
of its enterprise and see what it does not do so that we may know
what it does do.
One thing
U.S. A.
does not do is originate; it confirms but does
not advance and it summarizes but does not suggest. There is no
accent or tone of feeling that one is tempted to make one's own and
carry further in one's own way. No writer, I think, will go to school
to Dos Passos, and readers, however much they may admire
him
will not stand in the relation to him in which they stand, say, to
Stendhal or Henry James or even E. M. Forster. Dos Passos' plan is
greater than its result in feeling; his book
tells
more than it
is.
Yet
what it tells, and tells with accuracy, St1btlety and skill, is enormously
important and no one else has yet told it half so well.
*
U. S. A.
By John Dos Passos. Harcourt, Brace. $3.00.
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