August 2024. The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
1930, HarperCollins, 489 pages. Written in English, read in English.
Two thoughts went through my head as I was reading this novel. One was of a radio, one of those old ones with the big dials that you turn this way and that, trying to get the right frequency of the station you want to listen to. The novel has a narrative, that appears to follow the life of one character, but then there are other types of writing interjected into it, streams of consciousness and newspaper clippings and news radio transcripts that are either collected and paired together randomly, or are completely fabricated, and at some point the original station — the narrative of that one character — appears lost, and another character takes its place and we find ourselves trying to tune into the frequency of that character.
The other thought was of those horrible holiday themed movies, in which there is an immense cast of characters, all seeming to have separate unrelated stories, but that are all coming together at some point close to the end, either meeting incidentally or, unbeknownst to u, s having known each other all along.
Both of those thoughts are on account of the unique way in which this novel is structured — constructed of four types of writing. The first is a standard narrative, marked by chapters that are all titled with the name of the protagonist they follow. We begin with Mac, who we are acquainted to as Fainy. He is the son of Irish immigrants, his parents shortly die and he is placed in the care of his uncle, and when that uncle has to go bankrupt, Fainy appears to tumble through life — sometimes of his own volition and sometimes by mere chance — eventually finds himself in Mexico, at the time of Zappata’s revolution. But while his narrative is forward moving chronologically, it is not consecutive — there are pieces of stream of consciousness writing, which may be autobiographical reminiscences of the author, all titled The Camera Eye and numbered; there are random combination of newspaper headlines and news radio transcripts, titled Newsreel and numbered with roman numerals; and there are some shorter narrative pieces that appear to be biographical overviews of some of the famous people of the time — Carnegie, Edison, Steinmetz. Some of them briefly appear in the main narrative and most don’t.
Three additional characters replace Mac when his frequency is lost. There is Janey Williams, who is a stenographer who finds herself able to work for, and then become the personal secretary of, J. Ward Moorehouse, who is the third character — he is a young businessman who happens to fall in love with, and marry, two women who belong to very wealthy families, making his way in the world in that way. And there is also Eleanor Stoddard, who builds her own interior decor business with a partner and becomes a friend of Moorehouse. Some of them eventually find a loose connection to Mac. We are introduced to the fifth character Charlier Anderson, at the end of the novel, and while his story does not yet intertwine with that of the four other characters, parts of his story echo the beginning of Mac’s story.
Within these characters’ stories, as well as with the disparate news clippings and transcripts, and to a lesser degree the stream of consciousness vignettes, Dos Passos paints a picture of the struggle between the working class and the business class in the United States of the beginning of the 20th century — and puts it against the larger contrast of the looming world war.
The September 2024 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
