This book is a good place to start if you are a young Englishman wanting to understand America in the first decades of the twentieth century, which Bowie clearly did. Where did rock ’n’ roll originate, after all? Little read today but extravagantly praised on publication, The 42nd Parallel used modernist techniques from the visual arts like collage, montage, and eccentric typography—John Dos Passos was a painter, too, and designed his own book jackets—in the service of a downbeat naturalism. Dos Passos’s father was a corporate lawyer, the son of a Portuguese immigrant. He was living apart from his first wife when he began a relationship with a widow from Virginia that resulted in John’s birth in 1896. The pair didn’t marry until 1910, by which time John had been packed away to Europe for his education, enduring a lonely, itinerant childhood where books were his only consolation.
Set in the run-up to the First World War, in which Dos Passos served as an ambulance driver, The 42nd Parallel is the first part of his huge, grandly named U.S.A. trilogy—it was followed by 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936). Its sections of “straightforward” narrative dwell upon twelve intertwined lives, of characters like “Mac” McCreary, a salesman-turned-printer who gets involved in left-wing politics and leaves his wife and children to become a revolutionary in Mexico, and snooty interior designer Eleanor Stoddard. But for Dos Passos, novel writing was a kind of higher journalism that should aspire to nothing less than diagnosing a nation’s ills. This is why he intersperses documentary material: sixty-eight “Newsreels” consisting of newspaper headlines and stories as well as snatches of popular songs; fifty-one stream-of-consciousness “Camera Eye” sections in which he grants us somewhat oblique insights into his own life; and twenty-seven curious, slightly arch biographical sketches of famous men (Henry Ford, Woodrow Wilson) and one woman (Isadora Duncan).
Dos Passos put his all into researching the books to make them as authentic as possible. Malcolm Cowley remembers the way he traveled across America by train, visiting cotton mills in Carolina, coal fields in Kentucky—anywhere he felt there was likely to be social ferment. It’s hard to believe that by the 1960s this crusader for social justice had swapped his Marxism for an extreme brand of right-wing libertarianism, writing for the National Review and campaigning for Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon.
In the U.S.A. trilogy, however, the theme is very much wasted potential and the conflict between labor and capital; the way ordinary men and women are ground into dust by the effort of pursuing wealth and success. It’s territory Bowie explored on “Young Americans,” his poignant Springsteenesque tale of a slinky vagabond who gets a young girl pregnant, then ends up begging off a bathroom floor. The starkness of the contrast between rich and poor—Bowie’s got a suite, he’s got defeat—is emotionally cauterizing until in the end there isn’t one damn song that can make him break down and cry.