The bad old 1930s seemed deservedly forgotten until the economy did its best last year to impersonate the post-1929 years. Suddenly John Maynard Keynes and Herbert Hoover were dusted off, Johnny Depp was playing John Dillinger and the Pittsburgh Opera staged "The Grapes of Wrath."

This renewed interest in the '30s can't hurt this new overview of the Depression-era by Morris Dickstein, an English and theater professor at City University of New York. That's what drew me to it, and I presume others; otherwise his 530-page plod through the era moves like a Hupmobile in need of a ring job.

In the parlance these days of Web sites that collect the news of other Web sites, Dickstein is an "aggregator," a collector of ideas from many sources on literature, theater, style, radio and films.

It's an impressive collection, a lot like the basement of Xanadu in "Citizen Kane," Dickstein's favorite film, one that he says sums up the years before it. And, in the vein of Charles Foster Kane's undisciplined acquisitive nature, Dickstein grabs from here and there seemingly without a plan, but the result isn't what you'd expect.

Rather than building an argument from sources that support it, Dickstein's material runs in many directions. The upshot is that his book, in fact, reaches no general conclusion about Depression culture, but instead collects comments and criticism about specific subjects, such as John Steinbeck or Busby Berkeley movies.

Perhaps this era can't be easily summed up, just like Rosebud couldn't tell Kane's whole story, as one of the newsreel reporters points out. Or, perhaps Dickstein does see his role as aggregator of cultural studies, not the arbiter of them.

In the field of literature, for instance, most novels are not "ripped from the headlines," but are either about the past or the future. The "big novel" of the Depression, Steinbeck's tragedy of the Joads, who didn't find the Promised Land, was published in 1939, on the eve of America's wartime prosperity.

It focused on one segment of the Depression -- the flight of poor farm families from the Dust Bowl to California -- while other problem topics, from the urban poor, including the African-American migration north, to the struggle between capitalism and collectivism, were under-covered.

While Dickstein investigates such writers as Nathanael West and Henry Roth at length, authors of little-noticed novels at the time, he skirts the more popular '30s novelists Pearl Buck, John P. Marquand and Sinclair Lewis.

Robert Frost, truly as the author notes, was the closest thing America had to a public poet, is shoehorned into the era with clumsy interpretations of his work in "A Further Range," his 1936 collection. Dickstein also misspells the first name of Frost's major biographer, Lawrance Thompson. He also lists Hoover as the "35th president" when the unfortunate Republican was No. 31.

I wish he had reserved more discussion for William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, but their poetry largely resists facile description.

His discussion of the movies, from the realism of "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" to the fantasy of "42nd Street" to the morality tales of the gangster genre, sags into conventional commentary, and, in his passivity, wanders without firm conclusions.

Theater, popular culture, the radio and style receive similar treatment.

"Dancing in the Dark" leaves us flatfooted when we expected a more graceful, Astaire-Rogers twirl through a gloomy American era.

Contact Bob Hoover at 412-263-1634 or bhoover@post-gazette.com.