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Since Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road many a U. S. writer has attempted a modern sequel to that ringing inventory of the U. S. scene. Bravest of these attempts have come from such contemporary novelists as John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe. To the lesser footnotes Novelist Nathan Asch (The Office, Pay Day) this week added his own modestly tentative, well-written account of what the U. S. means after a four-month bus trip...
...Like Dos Passos, Author Asch believes the way to go about anatomizing the U. S. is to examine the private histories of the people who are not news. "What I wanted to see was what was so typical that to the natives it was almost banal." He took a bus because it was cheapest, because train travel is stilted and because in an automobile "the only ones you get to talk to are filling station men and traffic cops." In a bus the atmosphere is unaffected, intimate. "Under the murderous vibration . . . you've got to relax . . . everybody sings...
...being abroad in space and time. The sense of time elapsing which the discontinuous "action" of the story gives is further deepened whenever the clock strikes and the years move on, in scenes that show the seasons changing, day fading into night, night becoming day. These scenes, unlike John Dos Passos' Camera Eye, are described not from the vantage point of an individual but from a point in space somewhere above the world: "The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there...
Like John Dos Passes' trilogy, The Old Bunch is punctuated and underlined by scraps of current popular songs, but the background (Chicago from 1921 to 1934) is integrated with the story. Some of the 20-odd main characters wander to Manhattan, Paris, Palestine, Greece, Poland, but the principal focus is on Chicago and "the bunch'' as they grew up there. "The bunch," high-school age in 1921, were second-generation Russian Jews. Few of their immigrant fathers were well off; most of them were buttonhole makers, shoemakers, pawnbrokers, barbers, cigar-makers. Most of the mothers still spoke...
Most of the novels about the World War, from Andreas Latzko's Men in Battle (1930) to Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory (1935), have been in terms of frontline fighting. To such outstanding exceptions as John Dos Passos' Three Soldiers and Arnold Zweig's Case of Sergeant Grischa was added this week Author van der Meersch's Invasion-the first novel to show what the War was like for civilians caught behind the German lines. Invasion's scene is the district around Lille, in northern France, a narrow strip between the Belgian border...