The recent republication of an early novel, The Life of the Automobile, reminds us that Ehrenburg, at his best, was a surprisingly good writer. (p. 302)

What is remarkable is that Ehrenburg—in 1929—wanted to show the similarity between Communist Russia and the capitalist West. He realized that cars, oil, rubber were the real forces to be reckoned with in a machine-dominated world, whatever the ideology of a particular country.

At first glance, The Life of the Automobile might seem to resemble Futurist fiction, but … Ehrenburg's novel mocks the machine age and pictures the car as a scourge. But although Ehrenburg sets out to denounce technological progress, he revels in the demonic beauty of cars. Indeed, the rhythms of The Life of the Automobile are that of a car on a highway or of a teletype machine. It is a montage novel, a production in the industrial mode…. The Life of the Automobile is, in fact, supposed to be a documentary…. The modernist speciality is finding poetry in what had been perceived as nonpoetic, and The Life of the Automobile is suffused with the poetry of the car and of industrial civilization—a poetry that both seduces Ehrenburg and appalls him. (p. 304)

For all his distance from Marxist ideology at the time he wrote The Life of the Automobile, what Ehrenburg attempted there was to write not a Futurist but a materialist novel: one in which life proceeds, in its orthodox Marxist way, from material conditions. It is no accident, given the convergence between certain modernist presuppositions and Marxist first principles, that many modernists tried to be Communists. It is no accident, also, that the modernist writers who became Communists entirely ruined their talents—whether or not they lived under Communist governments. The difference in literary achievement between Julio Jurenito and The Life of the Automobile and such later novels as The Fall of Paris, The Storm, and The Thaw is huge…. In the end, modernism—outcast from the Left—became an aesthete's position and still remains so. Perhaps this is why The Life of the Automobile, although it seems to have little relevance to the direction of current Russian literature, has much for ours. The nonfiction or documentary novel is one of the forms attracting American writers these days—think of Doctorow's Ragtime or Coover's The Public Burning—and The Life of the Automobile is among the first and one of the most successful examples of the form. (p. 305)