USA.

The imprimatur of the Library of America is one indication of the significance of this book and, since the author was born 100 years ago, its republication is a commemoration. The first volume of Dos Passos's trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, appeared in 1930. With its companion volumes, 1919 and The Big Money, the entire work was issued in 1937 as USA, a thirties' book about the first three decades of the century - Progressivism to the Crash, with a strong central section on the war in France. Years ago I took a stab at reading USA, but was stopped by its apparatus - strange broken bits of "Newsreel" text - and narratives which didn't admit much friendly welcome. Happily, the passing of time has cleared up the nature of Dos Passos's masterpiece. I wish the book had been longer!

Reading about Dos Passos's life also brought revelations. He knew everyone of his extraordinary generation: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Cummings, most especially. He was a world traveler, lived abroad most of his childhood, was educated at Choate and Harvard, drove an ambulance in the World War I, was shelled, sniffed mustard gas, supported radical labor causes, and wrote and wrote, right to his death in 1970. He came to prefer the gospel of Henry Ford to that of Karl Marx, and alarmingly approved of Joseph McCarthy's hearings. But as a younger man, and especially in USA, his allegiance was clear.

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul..., have bought the laws and fenced the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch.

but do they know that the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight.

The case of Sacco and Vanzetti is the not-too-veiled allusion behind this selection from "The Camera Eye" section of USA, and the passage suggests how the novel's strange disruptions and its narratives interconnect.

So what is this work that bears such a portentous title? The three volumes tell in a disjunctive way the stories of twelve characters whose lives intersect directly or indirectly over a period of thirty years. Keeping track of who is who is sometimes a matter of scribbling notes in the margins, for Dos Passos weaves the stories or the principals and their acquaintances in surprising and rewarding ways. The chapters bear the chief characters' names and are separated in turn by a series of devices similar to those which Hemingway used in his earlier In Our Time. "The Camera Eye," "Newsreel," and biographies of historical figures are bulging bits of apparatus that announce the book itself as designed or engineered.

In "The Camera Eye" the narrator's stream of consciousness announces the novel's perspective. It is often, as in the excerpt above, declamatory. The "Newsreel" segments show themselves as headlines, phrases torn from contemporary news accounts, bits of popular song, all put together in collages. The spare story lines bump up against the dense and broken "Newsreels." The reader is in turn taken within the narrator's consciousness to be immersed in events hinted at in the "Newsreel," and on occasion not released until the biography of a contemporary historical figure is told in a stylized, often judgmental way.

Dos Passos's literary modernism takes the injunction "Make It New" seriously. The work's mechanism won't let us rest in the illusion of organic life. Larger, brutal forces disrupt the stories of the six men and six women and make their coherence suspect. It is difficult for a contemporary reader not to be befuddled by the sheer stream of events: violent labor disputes, socialist protest, police repression, the Wobblies, Joe Hill, the revolution in Mexico, the war in Europe, Prohibition, Hollywood, land speculation in Miami, and above all New York as the center of financial power and working-class exploitation. (This handsome edition helpfully provides a chronology of events mentioned in the narrative.) We are drowned in speakeasy booze, asphyxiated by cigarettes, and whored or seduced in rites of passage into adulthood. The motor car, the aeroplane, the telephone, the stock market, and the almost frenzied mobility they help to promote: all of those bedrock features of contemporary life were then new, shaping and molding those who made them or made use of them.

Dos Passos's introductory section, almost a rhapsody which can't but summon, in a new style, the America of Wait Whitman, asks the reader to walk the streets of USA and hear voices; those voices, we understand, are the substance of the book to follow. They are the voices of America that won't be put into the old skins of the traditional novel form without bursting them.

Those sections which relate the lives of committed activists, Ben Compton, Don Stevens, and Mary French, provide a compelling sense of the labor strife of the first part of the century. (I confess that Dos Passos introduced me in large measure to this history.) Wobblie organizers, clandestine presses, the Paterson silk workers' strike, police and goon brutality - Dos Passos renders these events with extraordinary ease and deftness. And given the numbers of places he must take us to - nothing less than the entire nation - his achievement is the more remarkable. Some critics take him to task as being unable to present the political philosophy that informed people like John Reed, whose biography appears, or that of the most ideological of his characters. But the formal design of USA articulates its own awkward, philosophical questions by a type of artistic cunning. It is almost as if Dos Passos has engineered the book to make a reader ask, "What is it for?" The "it" is this nation of ours as well as the stylistic features that attempt to render it.

Dos Passos's sense of form, an artistic sureness which tips its hat to Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, gives much satisfaction - even as the lives of the twelve principals seem to crash into a self-loathing middle age. Form goes some way to explaining why a book of so doleful a message, so unrelieved a sense of failed promise, is enjoyable. There is God's plenty here, and in that creative life a type of blueprint for the soul. Critics point to the fact that the "Vag" (Vagrant) sections that frame the work set up contradictions as juxtapositions, the structure once again making meaning: America is a continent and a holding company, a highway of promise and a journey to frustration. The open road lies before each of the two young men whose journeys are the front and end pieces to USA. After the knowledge which comes of the reading of the book, the irony which surrounds the hopeful hitchhiker at the conclusion should be crushing. Yet as the "Camera Eye" would have it, "we have only words against" the "they" or "strangers" who are alien to the real America. And where there are words from true voices, there is life.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.