The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson
The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money (the U.S.A. trilogy) by John Dos Passos

The turn of the twentieth century is an interesting time in American history, as the public and political mind finally caught up with the reality of the industrial revolution. It is, I’m given to understand, largely a story of Labor vs. Industry, of booming growth and rising aesthetic standards that still left an awful lot of ugliness behind it. In a lot of ways, I think of this as the dawn of modern America, of modern finance and war anyway, a modern press and modern industry, modern expectations of technology development. I see a familiar mindset budding here anyway, and these books do something to capture it at the moment. The Devil in the White City is easy non-fiction, sort of airport literature, but I thought that Larson’s perspective was a clever one. U.S.A. is an ambitious American novel, one of the canon.

The Devil in the White City arcs through the life of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair–the white city–from conception to abandonment, and follows it along with the story of the first big serial killer to emerge from the nation’s headlines. It’s told in the human scale of a novel, not presuming quite so far as to invent dialogue and carry on with the narrative authority of an novelist–it’s not fair to call it fictionalized in other words, but it does develop the story with some familiar thematic elements, in a fashion that reads like a plot advanced through the usual means of witnessing human conversations and travel, and revealed in descriptive passages of what a narrator might have seen were he present. When possible, he includes actual first-hand impressions, from letters or diaries, and this fills out the details pretty nicely. The prose styling felt a little too conscious to me, Larson peppers in some undergraduate-level wordplay here and there, and it reads a little like a weekend news magazine piece, but it’s not meant to be a deep meaningful novel, and it’s fine for what it is (and it’s not like I don’t sympathize).

The world’s fair, chock-a-block with corporate exposition, artificial landscapes, Bowdlerized history, inaccurate ethnicity, and engineered marvels, feels like it’s catching the modern American mindset at its source. It’s like the lies we told ourselves were fresh enough to be charming, a fake paradise designed with real integrity. Reading about the world’s fair is like witnessing the arrival of a beautiful throwaway culture developed before injection molding made it reproducible and ubiquitous. We get a great tour of the architectural and engineering talent of the day, the big names, all management and salesmen with big ideas and an eye toward the grand. It took imagination, persistence, and a hell of a work ethic, pulled off at great expense and just in time.

The architects come off pretty well, but I think Larson has a bigger problem with filling out the character of the serial killer, one (pseudonymous) H. H. Holmes. He admits (his notes are very considerate) that he took some liberties about Holmes’ motivations and mannerisms, basing it largely on modern criminology. And that’s just it: pretty much anyone who’s read a mystery novel, watched a movie about one of these monsters, or cringed at yet another expert profiler (like a police psychic, but with university cred) offered as a resident expert by an ever-hungry news cycle exploiting the horror du jour, and you sort of realize that even if this Holmes guy coughed up the first sick nugget, this is still the exact same vein of twisted criminal psychology that’s been artistically mined for a hundred years now, readily identified even to someone like me who normally goes far to avoid this kind of crap.

And Larson had an opportunity to make him something different too, maybe something scarier, because this was one industrious psychopath, a man who carefully penciled in a crematorium and laboratory space within the hotel and retail space he inexpertly engineered. The views of the facilities got to me a lot more than the customary(!) psychological portrayal of a mass murderer–I could see him carrying on as though possessed with a physician’s curiosity instead of bloodlust. He was not really that far afield from the popular concept of the ghoulish efforts of the earlier Victorian medicos, with the important caveat that Holmes hastened the cadavers to his studio. His amorality and his obsession were the scary parts; his oily smoothness and whatever frisson he might have attained from a murder was less convincing, too much of what I’ve reluctantly seen before.

The fitting counterpoint to the ideal of the white city was, of course, the dismal squalor of urban life, the reeking stockyards and fever and coal dust (which, I’ll add, Larson portrays very effectively). To the theatrical fact of the fair, the criminal is a fine juxtaposition. I can’t believe that this was the first serial murderer our country housed, but his was the first case to grow into a modern media circus, and probably the first such case to really get absorbed and solved. Maybe, oddly enough, it was a function of the growing value of life.

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I’m not, as a rule, a fan of thousand-page monsters that take me a month to read, but Dos Passos’ U.S.A. is epic enough as it stands to bustle its way into timelessness. It feels almost like a Western War and Peace, a tale of class struggle honoring the oppressed but expressed lengthily through the intersecting lives of sympathetic elites, this one full of obnoxious quick-talking (quicktalking) American verve. It was, at a minimum, engaging enough to break my rule of reading the same author sequentially, which, given Dos Passos’ technique of breaking the book into stylistically different sections, it half feels like I’m doing anyway, even in one book. Stupid rules.

The bulk of U.S.A. follows the characters, a rat-a-tat exercise in plotting, drawing them from childhood through their adult lives, a miniature life story pulled quickly this way and then that, actions and consequence, ongoing. What the plot narration lacks in introspection, Dos Passos brings out in a long series of highly subjective snapshot segments, “The Camera Eye,” closeups of what are presumably his own experiences told in a kind of freely structured prose, heavy on perceptions. (Heavily influenced by Joyce, I understand, but can’t personally assert. The Camera Eyes are not as challenging to follow.) I find some resonance in this approach, it captures the dynamic of early memories, both lucid and dreamlike. Here and there a detail sneaks out of these restless memories into the general plot, which is interesting, but not so frequently done as to write an easy thesis about it. He reserves his more obvious social commentary for another separate section, a series of snapshots of historical figures, painted tragically, lovingly, with contempt or irony. These figures lead more stable and pointed lives than any of his various characters. “Newsreel” is the fourth running segment, short sections made up of song lyrics, newspaper clippings, and headlines pasted together into bits of found art, which sometimes informs the story clearly and sometimes vaguely, and generally gives the external context of confusing stuff happening all around. I enjoyed the Newsreel segments a good deal, and they’d be a fun motif to adopt in a short format like this one (much as I try to avoid being topical), in the modern wash of low-quality information.

What the U.S.A. trilogy conspicuously lacks is a discursive narrative heavy on analysis, on interpretation, on assumed significance, on romancing the horrors and the joys of the human condition. Even the introspective sections don’t appear to go after any deep parallels, and whether Dos Passos was attempting to reveal a grand arc with all of small pieces is really what kept me reading until the end. Leisurely descriptions are also missing from these novels, although short serviceable ones abound. (It’s interesting to read the characters describe one another differently, for example.) There’s a solid sense of place that evolves, which almost surprises me, and many places get highlighted, a good fraction of which I’ve visited. Dos Passos takes us through industrial Connecticut, suburban Washington DC, Seattle, Chicago, California, Paris, Miami, Pittsburgh, and while New York City is frequently featured, it’s blessedly not the center of the universe, and as a canonical experience, farm life is (thankfully enough) completely neglected. There is humor, and it’s delivered in small patches like everything else. If Dos Passos’ Wildean quips felt sort of tortured, he was in his amusing element when he let the plot and dialogue unwind with a quick-spoken huckster’s absurdity. The sense of time is the most poignant artifact, and it wasn’t lost on me that this is my great-grandparents’ generation. The survivors of U.S.A. would have been checking out just as I was checking in. Tag.

Considering Dos Passos’ abrupt sort of plot exposition, the length of it is impressive. Stuff happens, and then it keeps happening. I started out really digging the short-story-ness of this approach, motivation and character economically dispensed with, and then scenes unfolding and closing like a life does (and as quickly). After a few iterations, this mode of exposition gave an impression of a mixed-and-matched set of plotlines, tracking a life through a sympathetic childhood to a disagreeable adulthood, going through some benchmarks in between: young impressions, walking out on the home, making friends, drinking, having sex, business success, drinking, dealing with unwanted pregnancy and/or closeted homosexuality, and eventually getting older. When the lines start interacting with one another, it’s actually surprising, it seemed till then that the intent had been to present slices of so many unrelated lives, and if that trick is bordering on tiresome by the middle of 1919 (when everyone is in Paris somehow), it grew interesting again as the third novel progressed, as if he were looking, like I said, for a broad point as similar life events got repeated under evolving circumstances.

Ultimately I see U.S.A. as a critique of Dos Passos’ times. People have similar impulses, and the scope of their consequences is directed by external stimuli, and it’s the latter, the external, which Dos Passos is really commenting on here. Though it’s clear where the author’s sympathies lie, his characters’ ups and downs aren’t governed by anything more than their own shallow decisions, and for all the bad times, the trend is upward in the first third of the trilogy. It’s weird–really weird–that we see so little of the war, but the war still feels like a turnaround. Some characters suffer more tragically. History gets warped as a consequence of the conflict, and importantly to Dos Passos, the Labor movement becomes more critical and adversarial. By The Big Money, some of the big historical events are hitting the character’s lives in an obvious fashion, there’s influenza now killing people on screen, and the lives lived in the boom twenties brings are larger, the self-destruction is deeper into society and more personally deadly to the people we’re supposed to relate to. We see, by the end, shots of hopeless mine-town squalor, and of idealists getting beaten down and shot. We see a movement rise, which I’ll tell you, is impossible to advocate in historical hindsight. But it’s a subtle picture that emerges from the whole, put together almost like a mosaic of similar pieces, and it’s an epic one.

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