The fact has to be faced that in his later fiction John Dos Passos is a failing novelist rather than a novelist of failure: a failing novelist largely because he has ceased to be an effective novelist of failure. It is scarcely possible to believe that the author of USA is producing books of which none is a vitalising pleasure to understand and evaluate, but it is true. Worse still, he is a writer whose deficiencies are no longer enlightening objects of critical attention, but one whose art is radically weak even in its most elementary aspects. The novels degenerate not simply in their incapacity to develop fresh thematic energies, but in the restless juggling of technical approaches, in the repetition of over-used and faded material, and in the slackening of the craftsman's hand that used to deal so readily with such fundamentals as the establishment of time, place and mood.
Chosen Country, as the title implies, is a tribute to U.S. civilisation and an announcement that the author has aligned himself with the most authentic tradition of American cultural identity. This is meant to be the Jeffersonian tradition; unfortunately it savours more of the elderly, comfort-loving, Time-reading, Republican-voting, stockmarket belt—the thinnest crust of any tradition. The author of Facing the Chair creates a hero of Italian descent who, after an early life of waywardness, 'comes home' to the United States. The story is written with a complete disregard for the nature of conviction and personal development and culminates in a section entitled, with supreme vulgarity and despite the fact that much of it is set in Canada, 'O My America My New Found Land'. Jay Pignatelli's rediscovery of his native land is accompanied (needless to say) by his marriage to a girl from an 'old family'. There seems little doubt that the writer considers this arrangement to have put everything right, and this belief alone measures the distance he has travelled. (pp. 135-36)
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