The fact has to be faced that in his later fiction John Dos Passos is a failing novelist rather than a novelist of failure: a failing novelist largely because he has ceased to be an effective novelist of failure. It is scarcely possible to believe that the author of USA is producing books of which none is a vitalising pleasure to understand and evaluate, but it is true. Worse still, he is a writer whose deficiencies are no longer enlightening objects of critical attention, but one whose art is radically weak even in its most elementary aspects. The novels degenerate not simply in their incapacity to develop fresh thematic energies, but in the restless juggling of technical approaches, in the repetition of over-used and faded material, and in the slackening of the craftsman's hand that used to deal so readily with such fundamentals as the establishment of time...