Reading 1001 discussion

Review thread: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Manhattan Transfer is a novel written by John Dos Passos in 1925. Dos Passos uses individual vignettes to tell the stories of characters living in New York City before and after World War I and during Prohibition. The novel portrays the city as a gritty and unrelentingly fast-paced place where happiness is elusive and wealth, youth, and luck are the keys to superficial success during the Jazz Age in New York.    

1. Characterize Ellen's interactions with men. How does she react, and what does she actively do?

2. Why is Jimmy dissatisfied with his newspaper career?

3. Compare and contrast Congo's character with Emile's.

4. Why does Ellen call her husbands John "Jojo" and Jimmy "Jimps"?

5. Ellen's name changes from Ellie to Elaine. What do these name changes indicate about her or other characters' perceptions?

6. Stan is the only man whom Ellen loves. Why does she love him? Why does she abort his baby?

7. Describe the overall impression of New York City that the author conveys.

8. Select two descriptions that create distinctively different impressions. What poetic techniques, such as metaphor, simile, color, sound and feeling does the author use?

9. The stories and subplots in the novel are shuffled. How does this technique work or not work to move the stories ahead?

I finished this yesterday and now I have come to answer the questions I realise I have no real idea about any of the answers. This was a library book so I started reading early but I have had to renew as I didn't finish in the 3 weeks allowed. What this tells me is that I was not engaged with the book and I know this to be true because I never really wanted to read more than a chapter a day.

The vignettes didn't really work for me as I am not a short story fan and that is essentially what these felt like.

I clearly lost track of characters and was not really interested in their outcome.

I did like the portrayal of life in New York on a surface level.

All I can say is that this was not a book for me.

I am listening to the book. I also have it on Kindle but as Book has commented, I am not really connecting with the story. I find it hard to keep the characters straight.

The picture it is creating of New York in the twenties reinforces for thoughts that New York is not the place to go when you’re desperate.

I am going to try to find a way to engage with the story as I think that Dos Passos is an author to delve into.

1, Ellen is the example of the person passing through. Her marriages are just stops along the way. She is also an example of youth and beauty and the need to maintain that youth on Broadway.

2. Jimmy can't publish his articles because they don't fit the mainstream narrative. (not much different than today)

3. Congo is a successful immigrant as a bootlegger who makes money and can hobnob with millionaires. Emile is also French who immigrates to US after the war. He marries a French woman.

4.

5. Perhaps her becoming more distant less friendly

6. not sure why, was it that he had money? She aborts the baby out of "fury".

7. "moving", in motion

8.

9. I found it confusing and I don't know that it worked very well but Dos Passos was inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses and Elliot's, The Waste Land. His technique of Narrative collage was to try and create a visual experience.

1. Ellen sees marriage as a transaction and marries for practical considerations rather than love or passion. She marries Jojo Olgelthorpe, an actor, which suits him because it is a cover for his homosexuality, but eventually he tires of her frequent affairs. She falls in love with Stan Emery, a wealthy Harvard dropout and hopeless alcoholic. He eventually leaves her and marries someone else. When he kills himself in a fire Ellen aborts his child, and meets up in Europe with Jimmy Herf who has loved her from afar. His ethical rectitude and extreme poverty doom their marriage and Ellen marries George Baldwin an ambitious politician. Throughout she muses on her attractiveness and awareness that she has to make the most of it before it dissipates.
2. Jimmy has trouble getting his inflammatory pieces published so he is struggling financially.
3. Both Congo and Emile are immigrants who arrive with nothing. Both do well for different reasons. Emile marries his boss, a French delicatessan owner while Congo makes a spectacular fortune as a bootlegger. Congo has no scruples about taking the opportunity which Prohibition affords him and relishes his success, ending up with Ellen's friend Nevada, while Emile is an artist who moves in bohemian circles and struggles with the challenges of being an artist with integrity while trying to earn a living.
4. It connotes the insouciance with which she treats her husbands.
5. Ellie is a term of affection for the young Ellen, Elaine is a more sophisticated name as she rises in social circles.
6. I didn't get a sense of why Ellen loved Stan so much, perhaps because his drinking meant they were constantly enjoying a good time? She was furious with him for apparently commiting suicide in his kitchen, so aborted his baby. She may have akso considered the practicalities of raising a child alone, but that is not mentioned explicitly.
7. New York is an exciting chaotic mess which chews up its citizens arbitrarily. People still describe it this way. As an aside, my first visit to New York was anticlimatical. I expected more chaos and excitement and found Time Square rather ho-hum after living in Hong Kong for years and comparing TS to its namesake there.
8. I loved the opening sequence describing the orange rind and cabbage pieces being tossed in the water by the screws of the ferry. I listened to an Audible version, narrated by Joe Barrett, so I haven't any quotes to share, to my foreign mind the narrator seemed to convey a New Yorker's indifferent attitude to those who succeeded and those who failed. I do remember the description of the disembarking passengers being like apples tossed around in a chute, and thinking that it was a striking contrast between city and country.
9. It was confusing, but just like last month's The Hive (I am wondering if Cela read this book?) I just went with the flow and the memorable characters like George Baldwin, Ellen Thatcher and Jimmy Herf became clearer the further one delved into the story.

1. Characterize Ellen's interactions with men. How does she react, and what does she actively do?
Ellen has a hard headed attitude towards men and keeps them at a distance to keep the upper hand. The men in her life change as she changes her name, reinventing herself and leaving her old self behind along with her old partners.

2. Why is Jimmy dissatisfied with his newspaper career?
Jimmy is too idealistic and uncompromising, so he isn’t prepared to adapt to get a foothold in his career. He is unhappy at being low paid.

3. Compare and contrast Congo's character with Emile's.
Congo is more opportunistic and prepared to take risks. Emile is more reserved and seeks security. Each finds a way to ‘make it’ but Congo is a more vibrant and memorable character.

4. Why does Ellen call her husbands John "Jojo" and Jimmy "Jimps"?
Her approach has an air of carelessness, but it’s also a mark of the familiarity and affection with which she regards them. A kind of contemptuous fondness.

5. Ellen's name changes from Ellie to Elaine. What do these name changes indicate about her or other characters' perceptions?
Her name changes mark the stages in her progression to success and as a different person. She also becomes Helena when she is with Jimmy, she matches her name to her current occupation and then casts it off to reinvent herself with added sophistication each time,

6. Stan is the only man whom Ellen loves. Why does she love him? Why does she abort his baby?
Stan doesn’t make demands on her like her other admirers, and initially they have fun. Although he is fond of Ellen, as an alcoholic he puts drinking first and even marries someone else, so there is probably an element of wanting someone she can’t completely have. It’s not clear why she aborts the baby apart from some anger at him for dying but she must know how difficult life would be as a single mother.

7. Describe the overall impression of New York City that the author conveys.
It’s a chaotic and exciting place but no place for the weak or vulnerable - they just disappear into the darkness. There’s a sense of continuous movement and struggle, with hustling and corruption going on at all levels.

8. Select two descriptions that create distinctively different impressions. What poetic techniques, such as metaphor, simile, color, sound and feeling does the author use?
Clouds described as “bright and white like tinfoil”
“He held the dramatic section of the paper taut between two grimy flippers”
Both the simile and the metaphor used here are unusual, and they seem very appropriate to the setting.

9. The stories and subplots in the novel are shuffled. How does this technique work or not work to move the stories ahead?
I think the technique works very well, it allows the stories to overlap and move each other along, filling in gaps and adding other perspectives. It makes it very visual and cinematic in its feel. I did feel a couple of the plots weren’t clearly resolved, but I may have missed them as that approach does demand really careful attention.

I have been reading Wharton's Old New York and there is a pivotal point in that book in which there is a fire in the Fifth Street Hotel. I guess New York in the 20's was often having fires but it is interesting that both books had it in the same hotel. Also, one of the books left in the library in Manhattan Transfer was The Golden Ass, and I just read that for my Random Challenge.
Everything overlapping...

1. Characterize Ellen's interactions with men. How does she react, and what does she actively do?

Ellen cares for her father but does not change her intentions to accommodate his. As others have mentioned, she keeps everyone except Stan at arm's length and makes alliances based on what they can do for her. She is grateful to Jojo but doesn't love him in the least. She does understand completely his nature and doesn't judge him for that. She doesn't actually like woman any better either.

2. Why is Jimmy dissatisfied with his newspaper career?

Jimmy is in love with words and often chants them but his writing for the newspapers only seems to remove him from both meaningful words and real living. He is only reporting life rather than living it and doesn't seem to know how to live life. He loves Ellen (Elaine, Helena) but doesn't have a clue how to keep her happy. At any early age, his mother had some support and later his uncle took care of him, so he has some expectation of being able to live with a respectable income but doesn't know how to go about making that respectable income. He is also "flighty". He always wants to be somewhere other than where he is. Further, his political leanings are decidedly socialist and in support of the common man, and few of the New York newspapers of that era wanted those kind of articles.

3. Compare and contrast Congo's character with Emile's.

Pip answered this completely. Congo was a great character. He had no social scruples but he was very loyal to his friends. Like Jimmy, I would not have necessarily guessed that Congo would make it big financially. In the beginning he seemed to be headed toward disaster.

4. Why does Ellen call her husbands John "Jojo" and Jimmy "Jimps"?

Names change in this book to fit the conditions. Ellen keeps her men at a distance by not even respecting their names. Instead she uses names that could be used for a cute pet but would not make someone feel loved.

5. Ellen's name changes from Ellie to Elaine. What do these name changes indicate about her or other characters' perceptions?

Ellie is a cute girlish name and Elaine is more sophisticated. People call her different names but unlike Jogo and Jumps, they signal respect when they shift her name. They even call her Mrs. Herf.

6. Stan is the only man whom Ellen loves. Why does she love him? Why does she abort his baby?

I could not figure this out while I was reading the book. Stan has money but doesn't spend it on her and she doesn't appear to care about the money. She says she likes him because he is fun to be with but really, is it fun to drag someone half dead and fully clothed out of a bathtub? I think Stan was meant to represent someone that didn't care one bit about success and Ellen, who cared very much about success, found that amazingly freeing. I think that she thought that there was no reason to have the baby once Stan died. The baby would be difficult to raise when she had no financial resources and it would not bring back Stan who had obviously chosen to desert her in the most conclusive way possible.

7. Describe the overall impression of New York City that the author conveys.

The comment about the legless man looking up and seeing a dirigible while all these legs went by, really captured it for me. New York is somewhere where it is difficult to get lost (grid streets) but very easy to lose your way. It is chaotic, and dirty and constantly humming but it is also full of a pulsing aggressive life. It is so very different than other huge cities like Tokyo, Shanghai and London, which seem to have more interesting street life and are strangely more global.
One funny thing is that New York in 1920 was not that much smaller than it is now. Unlike some cities like Tokyo it has added a couple million but 10 million. The fact that the characters seem to know each other even though they come from different classes and keep running into each would be contrived if the story was written in a different way.

8. Select two descriptions that create distinctively different impressions. What poetic techniques, such as metaphor, simile, color, sound and feeling does the author use?

I did take note of what everyone was eating. Although there were the down and out people like Joe Harland that didn't have the money to eat at all, largely even the working class seemed to eat big meals. There were a lot of descriptions of both breakfast and dinner; bacon and eggs, oysters, veal cutlets with sweet potatoes. Often because people were drinking too much, they got sick and couldn't eat.

The author loved to describe simple things that encapsulated the sense of the city....the classic one being the ferries docking and having the people spill out.

9. The stories and subplots in the novel are shuffled. How does this technique work or not work to move the stories ahead?

It made me conclude that the story was about New York at a specific time and not really about the characters that inhabited the city. The people were largely stand ins for a large segment of the population that were struggling in various ways. We did learn quite a bit about Ellen, Baldwin, and Jimmy but even there we didn't get to real endings or see them through a true change of heart. Ellen, Baldwin and Jimmy might change their names or their jobs but not their nature. I enjoyed the various perspectives and the way that they knit together or unraveled over the course of the book but I didn't really care about the outcome of any of the subplots or what ultimately happened to any of the characters except Congo and Anna.

1. Characterize Ellen's interactions with men. How does she react, and what does she actively do?

I like Pip’s answer. I will add that I felt that she was using them more than they thought they would be using her. She knew that they were firstly attracted to her beauty, but, for most of them, they were convenient to her at various times of her life. Interesting that she was always reinventing herself at every new relationship, especially when it came to the spelling of her name.

2. Why is Jimmy dissatisfied with his newspaper career?

Jimmy loves writing, but it became meaningless for him. I also think that he wanted to be out of New York or, at least, out of the sphere of influence of New York, which he did not achieve when he want to Europe during the war, but probably was on his way to achieve when he was walking away in the final scene of the book.

3. Compare and contrast Congo's character with Emile's.

Emile desires to have a settled life, while Congo was open to try his luck elsewhere at the risk of becoming rich. Which he did.

5. Ellen's name changes from Ellie to Elaine. What do these name changes indicate about her or other characters' perceptions?

I kind of covered that in Q1.

7. Describe the overall impression of New York City that the author conveys.

I guess it conveyed pretty much what New York has generally been: a place of contrasting fortunes, a place where opportunities and disasters can wait for you around the corner. This was probably hypertrophied during the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age, and I feel that the modernist treatment given by Dos Passos actually suits very well the topic.

8. Select two descriptions that create distinctively different impressions. What poetic techniques, such as metaphor, simile, color, sound and feeling does the author use?

As others have mentioned, food features prominently in the book, even when it is lacking. I also noticed several mentions of various smells. I guess Dos Passos aimed at making the novel as sensory as possible, which explains why he uses sensory descriptions quite frequently. Even the grit in your mouth on a windy day appears a few times.

9. The stories and subplots in the novel are shuffled. How does this technique work or not work to move the stories ahead?

I didn’t really mind, as the book is probably more about New York than the characters he used to portray the city. From the perspective, it is similar to The Hive’s Madrid from Cela. At times, however, I felt taken a bit aback by the ellipses in time which occurred between the appearances of the same character; I even felt that certain passages were not shown chronologically, but some sort of asynchronicity.