District of Columbia is not as innovative in technique as Dos Passos's earlier works like Manhattan Transfer or U.S.A., but the author employs original variations on traditional narrative forms in each book.

In one respect, the three novels are less like one another than were the three comprising U.S.A., which, as critic Alfred Kazin was among the first to argue, is a progressive refinement of one single experiment in narrative montage. One innovation for the second trilogy as a whole is that all three books are linked by their emphasis on the fate of the Spottswood family and the association of each story with the emerging geographical center of world power, Washington, D.C.

As in U.S.A., several minor characters appear in all three novels.

Another common innovation is the introduction of each section by a prosepoem. A few critics have complained...