John Dos Passos records and resists in U.S.A. the extinction of the private voice, the invasion of the private space, by the devastating forces of history. The landscapes of the test, like those of Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer, are strewn with that devastation's debris—the residue of character, the remains of narrative. Dos Passos chronicles in the trilogy the voices and the acts of residual men—the echoes, the fragments that compose America.
U.S.A. expands the themes and techniques of Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer. Structurally it is even more artificial and patterned. The usual criterion of realistic style, that it vanishes before the reality of the subject, does not apply to its pages. As in Manhattan Transfer Dos Passos deforms the voices of America, the bankrupt speech of anonymous men…. U.S.A. is not a recording of America. And it is not a story about America. Traditional novelistic unities of character and action are abandoned; beginnings and endings of persons and events are fortuitous. There is little progress, little growth, little development of character; there is no real concern with representation, illusion, or empathy. The trilogy is not held together by any chain of events or "storyline"; it must be apprehended spatially and not sequentially. Sequence yields to a structure characterized by the juxtaposition of disconnected and often incompatible word blocks. U.S.A. is a continent and a composition ruled by crisis and collision; it is fragmented, radically incomplete, and as amorphous and incoherent at times as its characters' lives.
