Customer Reviews

Manhattan Transfer

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is really one of the best American novels. Its style is unique. You will not "read" this book, but you are going to
smell New York, hear New York, see New York, walk around Manhattan on your own sore feet. It is also a fascinating work because different stories run in parallel in it. It may take you a while to find your way through the book, but then, it will give you a panoramic impression about NY at Dos Passos' time. This book is also a somewhat sceptical, even resigned or pessimistic book. Certainly, it reflects some of Dos Passos' own experiences, and life is not always happy-ended. Don't blame that on the book. This book is inimitable. Even Dos Passos himself did not succeed to create another work which is as uniform in style, compelling, impressive and impressionistic as this one. The USA trilogy is far more diconnected, harder to read, and the unique stlye of Manhattan Transfer turns into mere mannerism in the later trilogy. However, in "Manhattan Transfer", everything is perfectly at balance, the style fits the objective perfectly, and there is no arbitrariness. Be patient when reading this book. It does not "tell a story" in straightforward way, so the fun of reading this book is not following a well-knit plot, but the fun lies rather in the process of reading itself, enjoying the style, cherishing every single line. A must read.

Within the first few pages, it becomes apparent quickly that Manhattan Transfer is not a traditional novel. Dos Passos presents a collage of New York City in the 1920's that even 75 years later describes well the modern city. His technique of jumping from character to character as they interact with each other within the city as some succeed and others fail provides a bleak, yet at the same time oddly wonderful reading. His injection of newspaper ads, songs, and advertisements captures so well the bustle of large cities. I can only wonder why he is often left out of the "canon" of American Modernists. It does take adjustment to read Manhattan Transfer, but you will be more than rewarded for your efforts.

Manhattan Transfer is a subway ride through New York - both across its geographic landscape - a burgeoning metropolis, the heart of the American economy; but also, slums, dark alleys and industrial wasteland. Likewise it is a ride across the ethnic and social landscape - self-made men, fatcats, bored bourgeois bohemians and anarchists, destitute immigrants, ambitious chorus girls, and washed up stock brokers.

Dos Passsos's book is like a running paragraph that only briefly stops to take us from one sub-scape to another - his voyeuristic way of relating the social current of WWI and 1920's New York to the everyday lives of people, many of whom are caught up in that current. Dos Passos does not quite uncover any new ground or dig deep into any one point - he covers a lot of ground - there is a sense of equilibrium one gets from reading his prose. Just a few just-below the surface issues he tackles are the budding concerns of untested feminism, the moral puritanism of the Prohibition; less oblique are the issues of unfettered capitalism.

Indisputably, Dos Passos's ability to weave in and out of lives while weaving the tapestry of an exciting period in NY and America is admirable. Still, there is an aloofness in a book whose characters are less important to the story than the social forces that encompass them. With no one to anchor the story (despite some possible tenable arguments for the recurring characters), the story just keeps floating along. It doesn't have to end after 400 pages, it can run on ad infinitum.

Manhattan Transfer presents the good, the bad and the ugly side of life in New York. Money seems to be the driving force behind everybody's lives and love is hard to come by. However, even the failure to realise one's goals does not deter one from hanging on in New York, as Bud does. It is, after all, the 'center of things.' It is in the end Jimmy, who emerges as the man who dares to rebel aganst the 'getting and spending' life that the city promises. The various vignettes that Dos Passos offers somehow tie up, as they all have common concerns, concerns that centre around the great American Dream. What Dos Passos really wants to reveal is the hollowness of this dream.

The prose style presented in Manhattan Transfer is fresh and unorthodox, two characteristics that all great literature must contain.

The narrator of the novel is an eavesdropper who chooses his subjects at will. You are able to spend three pages with a subject, then not hear from the subject until scores of pages later, if at all.

Manhattan Transfer serves as a history book, but not the standard type. You actually get to feel, hear, taste and smell what it was like to be in NYC during the early half of the 20th century. Most history books cite landmark events, but Manhattan Transfer records the life of the people living rather than the events the people were involved in.

John Dos Passos is one of the most overlooked, underappreciated American writers of the 20th century. I highly recommend this book to everyone. You must visit NYC to fully appreciate the book, though.

Manhattan Transfer's plot is a series of interwoven stories that span several generations of interconnected lives in early twentieth-century New York City. The most appealing element of the book is Dos Passos's beatifully poetic descriptive prose. The mini-plots are a bit over-contrived and difficult to follow; he assigns them less attention and care than his descriptions of the city itself, but this is his intention. As a reader, I felt no emotional connection to any of the (many) characters I met; I did, however, feel a deep attachment to the city. It is an organic being in Dos Passos's cosmology--it is in fact the book's protagonist, almost as though it's the city's growth we're meant to be charting through the decades and its relationships with its inhabitants, rather than vice versa. His use of verbs is brilliant and rather unique: the city "breathes," it "sweats," it "sighs"; it is alive. As a book lover, you'll appreciate the language, and as a New Yorker, you simply can't not read this novel.

It is tragic that he isn't more celebrated. This is one of the best books I have ever read, because it works on so many levels: it is a wonderful pot-pourri of character portraits, it's a revealing examination of sociological values at work, and it is a marvelous literary work of a million subtle influences in harmony. It is, in short, a reflection of the motion-pictures that made their appearance at the time, and beyond that, is ripe with biblical allusions wonderfully entwined with the storyline. Dos Passos requires the reader to work, and he should be given more credit for making us do so with so much satisfaction.

John dos Passos stands amongst the "American modernists," a member of the lost generation, whose most outstanding feature in his literary production is a non-traditional writing style, an outspoken revolt against the molds of classic fiction. He invented the grammar of communication of the late twentieth century, and is considered by some critics as the American Joyce.

In "Manhattan Transfer" the author depicts New York City in the 20's, reflecting social concerns and the two-fold morality of the American Dream. In his narrative he weaves several scenes and a horde of unrelated characters, with flashes and cut-backs, better described as a movie-technique. With the use of stream of consciousness, the author relies on the the reader to make his own conclusion. In view of these innovative techniques, "Manhattan Transfer" does not fit in the traditional scheme of composition and requires some adjustment from the reader.

A knowledge of the author's biography (see "Dos Passos," by Virginia Spencer) is a necessary tool in understanding John dos Passos. His family history (he was an illegitimate child) is characterized by deceits and desertions, by a fundamental sense of not belonging in the scheme of society. It is clear that his characters carry autobiographical references.

Yes, a five-star book compared to most of them, but compared to "USA," this novel's a warm-up, between 3 & 4 stars, rounded up for innovation if not poise. In the start of each chapter you get marvelous, miniature modernist riffs, reminding me of saxophones, Carl Sandburg, Whitman, and Joyce (he loves those runoncompounds too); these anticipate the "Camera Eye" vignettes that would enrich "USA"'s own prose concoctions. Jimmy Derf (some surname) and Ellen Oglethorpe emerge at the end as the two main characters; others come and go much like life itself--the central figure is not one human but a cast of millions. As an urban reporter here, Dos Passos excels at capturing the snatches of dialogue, smells of the bums, grit of the air (it's rare that nature itself is shown as less than threatening, when it's evident at all), and shouts and noise that, then as now, relentlessly hums and pounds along Manhattan's streets. It's naturalism combined with realism.

Since "USA" for all its flaws is one of my favorite novels, I wanted to compare "MT." The pace is very quick: I read this in three sittings, one per main section. What still seems innovative eight decades later is Dos Passos' ability to skip forward within a dialogue to show how the minutes pass even as the characters are speaking--you hear enough to understand that moment, but the next line may be a half hour later into the situation or scene or action. This "jump-cut" characteristic becomes a bit maddening at times, as it does in cinema, but technically it's fun to watch! This adds to the filmic parallels that flow through "MT," which keeps the clips coming much as a well-edited docudrama might pull off.

After 9/11, some readers of the opening pages of "Moby Dick" noticed headlines of "war in Afghanistan" and the like that seemed to presage the current turmoil, 150 years before. Towards the end of "MT," my eye lingered as I re-read this paragraph: from a failed con-man talking to a slick lawyer: "I happen to know from a secret and reliable source that there is a subversive plot among undesirable elements in this country...Good God think of the Wall Street bomb outrage...I must say that the attitude of the press has been gratifying in one respect...in fact we're approaching a national unity undreamed of before the war." (part 3. ch. 1)

Dos Passos rarely lets his characters stand still and think things through. They try, but there's always someone bursting through the door, or buttonholing them on the street, or the danger, in one dramatic case, of daydreaming leading to disaster. He captures the frenetic speed demanded by NYC, and 20c city life, in this chronicle of a couple of handfuls of characters drawn to the bright lights, and the indifference of the city towards their ambitions and schemes. It's not uplifting or casual reading, but for an immersion into the sensations that ran through and past those who grew up from about 1900-1925, this novel, while uneven, captures what it must have been like for the latest generation who thought they were the first to invent novelty, encounter licentiousness, or concoct flim-flam and skulk around in deceit and skulduggery. Homosexuality, racism, injustice, bootlegging, protest, complacency, war-fever, and rags-to-riches and back down: all these color and vivify the portrayals of the few who stand for millions more in Manhattan.

The slang may have changed since then, and the buildings have grown higher, but the people, even though they are more types than rounded (with the exception of about half-a-dozen who endure through most of the novel)--they are the kinds of figures you can still encounter today on any crowded street.

THis often overlooked work by an often overlooked member of the Lost Generation is a true classic. Although it pales in comparison to Dos Passos' "U.S.A." trilogy, this is a great look at mankind in the early twentieth century in its own right, as well as an early predecessor of "U.S.A." Using his unique style of writing Dos Passos tells the tale of one man's journey to New York, and then proceeds to conntinue the story through the eyes of every single person he meets, and everyone they meet. A great read.