John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer is a wonderful example of the novel as time machine. I can’t think of many recent novels which have the ambition of this one from 1925, which attempts to portray, not just the lives of its individual characters, but the life of an entire metropolis over a period in time: the large picture (the social strata, the political forces at work behind the scenes) and the small.

Here’s what it was like to be “behind the counter under the sign The Best Sandwich in New York” with Ana Cohen, a waitress at Green Line Lunch

The stools are all full. Girls, officeboys, grayfaced bookkeepers. “Chicken sandwich and a cup o caufee.” “Cream cheese and olive sandwich and a glass of buttermilk.”

“Chocolate sundae.”

“Egg sandwich, coffee and doughnuts.” “Cup of boullion.” “Chicken broth.” “Chocolate icecream soda.” People eat hurriedly without looking at each other, with their eyes on their plates, in their cups. Behind the people sitting on stools those waiting nudge nearer. Some eat standing up. Some turn their backs on the counter and eat looking out through the glass partition and the sign hcnuL eniL neerG at the jostling crowds filing in and out the subway through the drabgreen gloom.

“Cream cheese and olive sandwich and a glass of buttermilk” — what a lunch that would have been! I can taste the tang of those olives, and the cold, sour buttermilk to wash it down. And if not for Dos Passos, who would now recall that this was once common lunchtime fare for the “girls, officeboys, [and] grayfaced bookkeepers” of Manhattan?