Dos Passos writes about a bunch of different characters living in New York City during the first couple of decades of the 20th Century. Several of the characters' paths end up interconnecting in one way or the other, but he still jumps between them every few pages or so. Which makes it a little frustrating trying to keep track, especially as he's also sometimes jumping forward months or years in time. So is this "Elaine" who all the guys go ga-ga over, the same little girl "Ellen" who went walking through the Park when she wasn't supposed to?
Everybody seems to be trying to succeed, in some sense or the other. Thinking that's going to make them happy, I guess. It doesn't work. Corporate empires fall, successful legal or political careers are unsatisfying. Marriages and children don't seem to do the trick, either. Jimmy Herf quits the newspaper to try and be a writer, and that only seems to destroy what little he did have. Ellen ditches acting to become an editor of something, doesn't seem to make a difference. The changes are all superficial, the core of the person is the same, and that core is yearning, deluded, unhappy, something.
The closest I think anyone gets to being happy is Congo, and he just seems to take things as they come. Content to work on freighters, then spend all his money in whatever port they land. Moves to bartending, somehow goes to bootlegging, somehow becomes a bigshot. We don't really see it, because Dos Passos skips that. Congo only shows up when his story intersects with one of the other, more prominent characters.
The book doesn't really work for me. Dos Passos adopts this tic of combining two words into one, seemingly at random. "Shinyrumped." "Garbagecan." Why they need to be a compound word escapes me, so it just feels like a pointless affectation. Beyond that, the subject matter just doesn't interest me much. Or maybe I see enough of it in the real world today, I don't need to read a story about people scrabbling futilely in the dust, hoping to find something.
"Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I'd like to meet somebody who wanted to fail. That's the only sublime thing."
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