Three Soldiers

[kenneth505]

Just finished this book and did a bit of googling on it. Here is the Wiki entry on the book:

Three Soldiers is a 1920[1] novel by the American writer and critic John Dos Passos. It is one of the key American war novels of the First World War, and remains a classic of the realist war novel genre. H.L. Mencken, then practising primarily as an American literary critic, praised the book in the pages of the Smart Set. "Until Three Soldiers is forgotten and fancy achieves its inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it--and no story that is less meticulously true will stand up to it. At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality."

The book is good, possibly great and I found it to be a challenging read. Dos Passos expects a lot from his reader. Although it is, it seems like it's not 'really' a WWI novel. The book seems to be less about 'war' and more about being in an army. It does raise some less covered issues such as what the American experience in France and Germany after armistice before treaty signing was like. Again only tangentially.

I find Mencken's praise above interesting. Members of this forum do not generally gush about this book in the same way. In fact I doubt that Three Soldiers would make an appearance on many must read lists compiled here. So what has changed since Mencken's time? How about the assertion above that the book remains a classic of realist war novels? Don't think I can agree with that either. However I'm loathe to dismiss the Mencken's opinion. So what am I missing?