The Big Money – John Dos Passos

When I did the Observer Top 100 Novels thing, I ticked the masterful USA trilogy off as read without actually having got round to volume 3. The shame! The degradation! Consider me duly shamefaced.

Still, it’s not as if the final instalment differs greatly from the first 2. We have the same mixture of partially interwoven character arcs, impressionistic "camera eye" sequences, potted biographies of major figures of the time (Hearst, the Wright brothers) and "newsreel" snippets of headlines and popular songs. Familiar though it is, the effect is still exhilarating.

I had forgotten how fond Dos Passos is of compound words. On the first page we get the intimidating “Linoleumsmelling companionway”.