See--and hear--the U.S.A.

Serious novelists were confronted with a problem after the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce had taken all the techniques of fiction, including some newer ones, such as what has been labeled "stream-of-consciousness," ratcheted them all up a notch, and produced a magic mountain of a novel--a Matterhorn that would loom over the rest of twentieth-century fiction, daring other writers to construct a more massive monument, challenging readers to scale it. And that was the problem, in both senses. Ulysses is a magnificent achievement whose summit leads--nowhere. It is inimitable. And for readers, while most acknowledge its significance, I'd bet that fewer than 10% of the voters in that bookstore poll that made Ulysses the greatest novel of the twentieth century read it.

So what does a novelist do in the wake of Ulysses (the problem does not arise with Joyce's final, oneiric peak--perhaps chasm is a better word, Finnegans Wake, which despite its circularity of form, almost shouts, "Dead End!")? Hemingway grasps a flensing knife and cuts away everything but the bare essentials, the 10% of the iceberg that is visible on the surface. Faulkner takes stream-of-consciousness to new levels (the beginning of The Sound and the Fury), but then relapses into baroque mellifluousness, since unremitting experimentation does not sell (and even Joyce had to have a patroness). And beside the omnipresent shadow of Joyce's achievement lies the other white whale of American literature--"the great American novel." Enter John Dos Passos. What better way to harpoon the latter than by writing a massive, triple-decker novel about America itself over the past thirty years (the first part was published in 1930)? The result is U.S.A., a trilogy of novels I've been traversing for a while now, with rest stops in 17-century Maryland and the realm of film noir. It is a tour-de-force, a panorama worthy of its subject--and yet I can also see why the book is, compared to the best of Hemingway and Faulkner, virtually unread today--a real shame, since its very technique is a triumphant democratization of the main methods of modernism.

To spare my readers (I think there's more than one), I'm going to break this discussion, like the meta-novel itself, into three parts. I want to mention here that the Library of America edition of U.S.A. that I read is, like all their editions, a joy to read: suitably heavy, but not overly so; nicely sized so that it can be held in one hand without fatigue; easily legible (I had to buy another copy of The Sot-Weed Factor since my original paperback copy's print was made for eyes 35 years younger than mine); printed on acid-free paper (so it will never take on that brownish-yellow tinge that made that paperback even more unreadable); and with just enough notes to explain obscure references, as well as a helpful chronology of the historical period covered. Superb value for the money.