Mike's Reviews > The 42nd Parallel

Stop searching, THIS is the great American novel... but "novel" doesn't really do it justice. It's a panoramic portrait of America in the first decades of the 20th century. Dos Passos' characters chase, in myriad ways, their American Dreams, as the nation rapidly matures in its new identity as an urban, commercial, world power. There is no plot here- the book, like so much other art of the time, is, in form as well as substance, something entirely new- a novel novel. The characters surge forward in their lives, crossing paths with each other and with various American luminaries of the day, but not toward any clear destination. The book is imbued with a sense of history: Dos Passos and his characters know they are caught up in the fierce urgency of their times- America is going SOMEWHERE, and FAST... but where? I think USA is even better when the reader knows of certain historical outcomes that Dos Passos could only speculate about...

I'm gonna go out on a limb: in considering the lives of Americans in the earliest decades of the 20th century, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were dilettantes. Dos Passos was the guru, the wizard, the sage, the virtuoso.