Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hopeless Migration

New York City was, perhaps still is, defined not so much geographically as spiritually by the unfulfilled aspirations of the people who migrate to it. And those migrants historically have come as much from the American hinterland as they have from across the ocean.

Manhattan Tranfer was a stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad in Newark, New Jersey before the tunnel under the Hudson connecting the mainline to Manhattan was completed. Once you arrived there, you had nowhere else to go but New York City. Dos Passos begins and ends his novel in this forlorn non-place. It is the entrance, for those already in America, into a world that was unique even within the uniqueness of America.

No one in this world is a native. All come because they are dissatisfied and become more dissatisfied as they acclimate to its brutality. It is a place of power not beauty, of deceit rather than wit, of crowded isolation.

These migrants want what others already have in New York City. They think that means money and opportunity. But more often they find that it’s disappointment and squalid, bare survival.

Immigrants from abroad come with nothing but hope. Migrants coming through Manhattan Transfer come with illusions rather than hope, and leave with less of both.

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