Then there are all the sights, sounds, smells, sensations, impressions, and emotions of the time - the raw, intimate, illuminating human stuff that a present-day writer looking back couldn’t hope to replicate. Along the way, we get an immersion course in cultural attitudes, historical events, people’s daily concerns, and the not-unfamiliar tensions between different layers of society. As fiction goes, it’s wandering, nearly plotless stuff, but I found the window into another time fascinating. The main narrative follows several different characters as they make their way through their lives between the turn of the century and World War One. Reader David Drummond, I would add, does a commendable job with a wide range of voices and deliveries - including the singing. Though this flipping-through-the-radio technique has been much-copied, it still feels innovative, especially in audio format. Like his contemporaries, Dos Passos writes in a common, everyday vernacular, with an eye and ear for realism, but also mixes in more experimental, modernist passages, such as streams of newspaper headlines and song lyrics, short biopics of various public figures, and the impressionistic, Joyce-ian “camera eye” sequences, which seem to recall scenes from the author’s own mind. Though John dos Passos hasn’t retained the fame of Hemingway or Fitzgerald, his America trilogy still feels like a landmark work of the Jazz Age, a sprawling, panoramic documentary of the US of the early 20th century. Powerful document of an all-too-familiar past

The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos