My dad, being my dad, decided to get me the collection of Dos Passos' USA trilogy, which starts with The 42nd Parallel. He returns to his motif in Manhattan Transfer of jumping between different characters' stories over the course of years. He goes even further this time, by adding a bunch of short sections called "The Camera's Eye" and "Newsreels".
The former seems like a child's stream of consciousness of different moments in a life, while the latter is a collection of I assume headlines and pieces of news articles. Although Dos Passos combines them so that a given sentence will shift focus entirely halfway through. It seems like some attempt at a mosaic of the moment in time he's trying to capture, but it mostly just turns into an opportunity for me to speedread through those sections.
So that mostly leaves following the character's lives. Most of whom usually find themselves stuck in a bad spot by the time they'd be leaving high school. One of their parents usually gets hurt, finances get tight, kid has to start working, sacrifice whatever plans they had. Ward Moorhouse wanted to be songwriter, didn't happen. Eleanor's plans to pursue an art career don't quite pan out.
That isn't to say everyone's life goes horribly, but there's a constant sense of dissatisfaction. They meet people, get married, but it doesn't last for one reason or the other. Moorhouse and Eleanor are both well-respected, but their businesses are houses of cards, able to crumble at any moment. Mac drifts back and forth between trying to work in printing shops and get involved in the labor struggle. Every time the honest work dries up, or the pressures at home mount, he wants to get involved in a revolution. Then he decides he gets tired of that and wants to go back to work, start a family. That falls apart, whole thing starts over again.
The whole story is set prior to the United States actually getting involved in World War I, so I don't figure Dos Passos is commenting on the confusion and listlessness of the people who survived that. Or maybe he is and he's saying that it was a pre-existing condition. that they're caught in a culture that says wealth and prosperity is there for everyone, and they just need to grab it, but there's a system of hoops that have to be jumped through and it's exhausting. An endless hamster wheel of never feeling you've quite made it, or you aren't secure in the place you've reached.
'and they let him be a socialist and believe that human society could be improved the way you can improve a dynamo and they let him be pro-German and write a letter offering his services to Lenin because mathematicians are so impractical who make up formulas by which you can build power plants, factories, subway systems, light, heat, air, sunshine but not human relations that affect the stockholders' money and the directors' salaries.'
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