A Good Deed for the Day

In contemplating how long I could live in my blog, post-demise of actually bodily self, I started thinking of posts I could write--the obvious starting place was all the books I have finished in the last few weeks, plus assorted sundry topics which have arisen in that time. I stopped when I came up with over 10 items without really thinking at all. I am seriously behind in recording the events of my life.

I finished John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy. (The last volume was The Big Money.) As I may have mentioned, I wanted to read this book as a part of my tutorial this semester because it was famous and I had seen it mentioned as "The Great American Novel."
After finishing the trilogy, I feel safe in saying:
1) It is not the Great American Novel, and
2) It is not a Great Book.

It's an OK book--Dos Passos can write well when he is at the top of his form, and the book just moves along without ever becoming a painful experience. He has some talent. Sadly, he put his talent at the disposal of the Great Hope of Marxists everywhere--the coming Socialist Revolution in America. I noted after the first part of the trilogy that the book seem like a tract arguing that Socialists are good, but it was a bit ambiguous. By the end of the trilogy, the ambiguity was gone.

The closest comparison for this trilogy is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. The Jungle is famous for it's gruesome scenes of the meat packing industry, but only about half the novel is about the meat industry, the rest is a generalized argument for the glory of the Socialist Revolution. Dos Passos' book is much, much better than Sinclair's, so if one wanted to read a tract explaining why capitalism is bad and socialists are good, Dos Passos is the one to read out of two. But, then again, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is even better if one wanted to read something in that genre. (The Grapes of Wrath is my least favorite of Steinbeck's major novels, though.)

The problem with Dos Passos' book is that it is too ham-handed. Every character in the book meets a miserable end, and since there are a lot of characters in a 1400 page trilogy, it is a lot of miserable ends. Nobody is happy. The socialists are unhappy because they are losing, but at least they are doing something noble. The non-socialists are unhappy and lousy human beings on top of that. Would it have killed Dos Passos to have had just one character marry, have kids, and lead a pleasant life? Does it really seem impossible for him to believe that anyone was actually having a decent life in early 20th century America?

One curiosity--the Library of America (my favorite publisher, by the way--I love the way Library of America volumes feel and look when I read them) has an edition of the U.S.A. trilogy, which means it will still be published in a century and it is now on a list of the Great American books. Yet, it is hard to imagine that anyone would want to read this book in a 100 years--the literary style simply isn't all that great, and the message already seems like a period piece. So, someday a poor unsuspecting reader is going to start this book, thinking it must be a Great Book, be thoroughly disappointed, and abandon the reading of Great Books. I feel very sorry for that person. And so, for the first time, I hope my blog lives on for 100 years, that said person in despair Googles the phrase "Why would anyone consider U.S.A. a Great Book?" and finds this post saying:
It isn't. Once upon a time, as hard as it is to believe, some people liked this sort of thing. But, do not despair. Read something else and renew your faith in the wonders of literature.

Now that I have done a good deed for the day, helping out some person 100 years from now, I don't feel so bad about skipping all the other work I should have been doing right now.