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MIDCENTURY (496 pp.)-John Dos Passos-Houghton Mifflin...
...John Dos Passos' U.S.A...
...villain of John Dos Passos' massive Depression trilogy, U.S.A., was big business. The villain of Dos Passos' latest novel, Midcentury, is big unions. This is certainly the most fascinating fact about the book and possibly the most significant. To Dos Passos, the last quarter-century is an upended hourglass in which the sands of power and the abrasive abuse of power have dramatically shifted...
After decades of diligent work and repeated failure, Novelist Dos Passos has turned back, almost in a gesture of despair, to the exact technique he employed in U.S.A. Slices of fictional personal histories are wedged between slabs of headlines and impressionistic biographic profiles of real-life movers and shapers. Instead of U.S.A.'s sardonic portraits of such tycoons as Carnegie, Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst, there are acid sketches of Dave Beck, Jimmy Hoffa and Harry Bridges. Dos Passos' own fictional characters are manikins, but they acquire a certain animation and excitement by being placed...
...letters. Norman Mailer's brutal, scatological novel of war on a Pacific island, The Naked and the Dead, was in its eleventh week as the nation's top bestseller, and the critical ovation was still going on. A few reviewers detected the strong influence of Melville and Dos Passos in Mailer's massive novel, and many Comstocks of the lending libraries were offended by its festering descriptions and raw, one-syllable dialogue; but in the general acclaim their voices were drowned out. At 25. Mailer had written the great novel of World War II. It had come...