John Dos Passos U.S.A

 U.S.A. is a vast, 1184 pages long, modernist novel. Reading approximately 100 pages a day it still took nearly two weeks. While it is long it is very readable, it's core is the personal and engaging stories of twelve individuals. This isn't Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake, while it is 'experimental' and there is a lot of it, the words are generally transparent and each character faces a clear narrative. Dos Passos tells stories, stories that draw you in.

The stories of the characters are broken up with other literary forms. There is a newsreel of fake newspaper headlines along with biographies of real American figures ranging from Henry Ford to Veblen. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction, newsreel and novel, are blurred.

It is in fact three novels in one, telling the tale of the USA during the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Above all, it is a socialist novel. Revolution is in the air. The International Workers of the World, maximalists, anarchists, the Communist Party and trade union militants fight injustice. America has long the been the site of brutal class warfare, the cops shoot workers hear, while some of the characters in contrast make millions from the sweat of others. Lenin and 'Trotzky' pop up in news reels and characters engage in revolutionary warfare in Mexico.

The first character introduced Mac, goes by the Christian name of Fenian, in memory of the Fenians who fought against Britain to build an independent Ireland. 

'Mac didn't usually say much, but sometimes he got sore and gave them a broadside of straight I.W.W. doctrine. Concha would finish all arguments by bringing on supper and saying with a shake of her head, "Every poor man socialista ....a como no? But when you get rich, quick you are very much capitalista." Penguin edition (2001:260-261)

Dos Passos was a fervent revolutionary when he wrote the trilogy, published in the 1930s. By the end of his life he was a right wing Republican, supporting Barry Goldwater and finally Richard Nixon. The erosion of revolutionary enthusiasm in the USA is one story but as capitalism grinds on inequality generates new lefts. Dos Passos, like Orwell fell out with Stalin during the Spanish Civil War, he went through his Orwell phase but lived longer and moved farther to the right than Eric Blair. What ever his later politics, U.S.A. is both a great novel and a great socialist novel, don't be put off by the length, it is an amalgam of many  interesting short stories.