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CHOSEN COUNTRY (485 pp.)-John Dos Passos-Houghton Mifflin...
...John Dos Passos' massive, radical trilogy, U.S.A. (1930-36), sizzled with social protest, sent admiring critics scurry-ng to Balzac and Tolstoy for comparisons. Now a mellow 55, Dos Passos has put together a long, loose chronicle that parallels the history of many an intellectual of his own generation...
Chosen Country spraddles some 80-odd years of American life (1848-1930), but ;he only ground it really covers is from soapbox to soap opera and back. To hold that ground, Dos Passos mobilizes a small army of characters, chief among them Jay Pignatelli...
...When he gets to the U.S. and Harvard Law School, the strain of being a "wop" makes him as sensitive as his bastardy. The pinch of his father's dwindling fortune makes him self-reliant, and his jumps through the rusty hoops of experience set up by Novelist Dos Passos make him a bore. Examples: Jay's first impotent foray into sex with a Greenwich Village "free love" addict; Jay seeing a friend die during his "baptism of fire" in World War I; Jay defending a pair of Sacco-Vanzetti-like philosophical anarchists without...
...happens]." The drug brought brief improvement. Radio Amateur Fred von Rekowsky, in New York City, kept up two-way talk with an amateur in Portugal, checking on the girl's progress. This week he heard the end of the chapter: despite everything, nine-year-old Branca Maria Medina dos Santos was dead of tuberculous meningitis...