Manhattan Transfer

The city is the protagonist; every human plot is a subplot underneath it. Dos Passos tracks financiers, chorus girls, immigrants, union organizers, and drifters as they brush past each other on ferries, in restaurants, on the same streets, mostly without noticing that they're all cogs in one machine. The recurring images of harbors, ferries, and railway terminals work as thresholds that promise transformation — a new arrival stepping off a boat, a striver catching a train uptown — but the novel's running joke is that New York never actually remakes anyone. It just launders ambition into more efficient, more compromised versions of the same hunger. Ellen Thatcher, who starts the book wanting to act, ends it married to the ambitious lawyer-politician George Baldwin, having traded artistic risk for a comfortable, empty security — the closest thing the novel has to a moral, and it applies to nearly everyone in the book.

Jimmy Herf is the closest thing to a stable point of view, a journalist who watches the city's material logic devour everyone around him and slowly comes to understand it will devour him too if he stays. Interspersed through the character chapters are Dos Passos's 'Newsreel' collages — real headlines, ad copy, and popular song lyrics chopped and layered together — which flood the narrative with the same commercial noise that's saturating his characters' inner lives. The effect isn't atmosphere; it's argument. Money, advertising, and gossip are shown literally colonizing consciousness, so that by the time any character has a private thought, it's already been shaped by the city's public chatter.

Dos Passos borrowed his cut-up, cross-cutting method partly from Joyce's Ulysses and partly from cinema — specifically the montage theories of Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein, whose juxtaposition of unrelated images to generate meaning Dos Passos essentially transposed onto prose. He extended it with his own inventions: the interpolated Newsreel clips, and later, in the USA trilogy, the stream-of-consciousness 'Camera Eye' sections and potted biographies of real public figures, all techniques Manhattan Transfer pioneers in embryonic form. The book made an entire metropolis narratable as a single organism rather than a backdrop for one protagonist's story.

Jean-Paul Sartre, reviewing Dos Passos in the 1930s, called him the greatest writer of the age and adapted similar simultaneity effects for his own Roads to Freedom trilogy. The lineage runs forward through USA's more radical formal experiments and out into later city-novels that try to hold an entire urban population in view at once, from Doctorow's Ragtime to the crowd-scene chapters of Invisible Man. Manhattan Transfer is the book that proved a novel could be structured like a city map instead of a plot.