A review by reidob
The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos

4.0

Widely praised after its publication and since as a masterpiece of American fiction, The 42nd Parallel gives us a portrait of life in the United States just prior to the First World War, a world of struggle, pleasure, restlessness, pain, joy, and the prosaic plodding of every day life. It focuses it's peripatetic lens on several characters in succession, then causes their paths to cross, sometimes significantly, other times more glancingly, but always with the purpose of throwing into relief some aspect or another of each person's essential nature that we might not have noticed otherwise.

This book is written in a unique style, with snippets of story interspersed with sections call The
Camera Eye and Newsreel, which provide impressionistic glimpses of the times in which our characters are living, a pastiche of events, sights, views, and disasters that informed their world.

Overall, I concur that this is a brilliant and accomplished piece of fiction. I did, however, find a bit off-putting the author's choice to distance himself from his subjects through the use of language and style which tends to alienate more than associate. This was no doubt intentional, but made the reading of it a bit of a slog, though I found this to be less the case as the book went on. Still, a fine read, and I look forward to moving on the the second book of the trilogy.