This book is almost as challenging to read as it is to review, because it innovatively eschews so many of what we would consider to be standard literary conventions and still manages, at times, to be a compelling read.

The novel opens on a ferry boat and quickly introduces two key elements: short segments featuring one or two major characters that comprise the chapters of the book, and a HUGE and diverse cast of characters that populate this slice of city life. With such an expansive project, much of the early going of the novel is merely keeping all the characters and their situations straight, with every few pages switching gears to explore a completely new scenario. It's disorienting, and probably intentionally so, in that it highlights through its style one of the problems of modernity.

Unfortunately, not all of these tales are particularly engrossing, and while some of them evolve throughout the novel, others appear in a blink and vanish. The evolution of Jimmy Herf, for instance, who grows up during the course of the novel, becomes more and more intriguing as he piles up successes and failures and comes to terms with his mother's death when he was a child. "Congo Jake," on the other hand, never really becomes more than a stereotype, and so we don't truly celebrate when his proverbial ship comes in late in the text.

But again, perhaps this is all part of the game: to mirror real life through the ways in which we keep up with and lose sight of people we perhaps wish we hadn't. To that end, the novel succeeds, but the lack of trajectory or clear resolution of many of these stories (or stories-in-progress) makes for a very unconventional work but also one that doesn't necessarily seem to be gesturing towards anything specific.

A good read for the patient and the attentive.

Opening and fragment:

http://www.dllab.caltech.edu/~adami/b... ( )

Dos Passos is an American writer I'm coming to appreciate more and more. This book originally published in 1925--is very experimental in nature following a variety of threads occuring often simultaneously and which more often than not resemble an impressionistic and cinematic style reliant on newspaper headlines and tin pan alley popular musical lyrics to fill the gaps between scenes and/or to flesh the scenes out. Dos Passos has a very good eye for detail and is very keen on showing the gap between the rich and the poor--those who are defeated far outweighing in numbers the success stories. The two main characters of Jimmy Herf--an orphan brought up in well to do circumstances by his mothers' wealthy family who somewhat to their chagrin rejects the opportunity to join the family business--and becomes a newspaper man instead and Elaine Thatcher an aspiring actress on Broadway being chased by a whole host of would be suitors--and both of whom over the course of events eventually hook up to raise the child of the man Elaine really loved--who had accidentally killed himself. There are however no real happy endings here. The marraige is doomed from the start and as the book ends the penniless Mr. Herf is to be seen hitchhiking out of New York out to what one would hope to be a new and better horizon.
Anyway liked it very much. ( )