U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money by John Dos Passos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Present at the Birth of Corporate Man

The modern de Tocqueville in fictional format. There is no better observer of the 20th century American character than Dos Passos. He chronicles that unique mixture of frenetic American activity coupled with an equally energetic despair.

Striving in America isn't based on hope but serves to avoid reflection on the need for hope or its source. It isn't possible to understand the attraction of a man like Donald Trump to a huge swathe of the American population without an appreciation of the characters Dos Passos constructs to populate his inter-war novels.

It is during this period that the cultural and political mould of the United States solidified to produce not the revolutionary, or the pioneer, or the successful immigrant, but the corporate man and woman who have to get on in a world that they little understand and don't much like. Trump is the son of one of these people and would continue the tradition.

Postscript: Dos Passos continued a focus on corporate life that I think was started by Theodore Dreiser and continued by authors like Louis Auchincloss and William Gaddis. They each in their own way record what might be called the corporate aesthetic as it emerged in America. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Although of an entirely different genre, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime might be considered as a sort of fictional birth notice of corporate America. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript 29Dec19: https://apple.news/AutauXztHQS2BlRtVA...

View all my reviews