Books: Victim of Publicity

AN AMERICAN DREAM GIRL (302 pp.) —James J. Farrell—Vanguard ($3).

Like most U.S. males, Author James T. (Studs Lonigan) Farrell has spent considerable time brooding over a weighty question: What’s wrong with American women? Like most, he has arrived at a lot of different answers. His favorite seems to be one given by a locked-up lunatic who narrates one of the 21 stories in Farrell’s An American Dream Girl.

“What I want to explain is why I killed my wife. Molly was a good woman. All our friends thought she was a wonderful wife. I suppose she was [but] whatever I would say to her, she would talk about something else … ‘Is supper ready, Molly?’ [I would ask]. ‘I’m going to try using peanut oil instead of olive oil as a base for my salad dressing,’ she would say … So I decided on the spur of the moment I was really going to make her say yes or no. I said: ‘Molly, I’m going to punch you in the nose, and I want to know if it hurts.’ So I hit her … All I did was to try and … get Molly, for once, to say yes or no to a question … It was an accident that her head hit the floor.”

The males who walk through some of the other stories are equally frustrated and confused:

¶ In Greenwich Village, an eager chewing-gum salesman complains that the girls who he thought wore the roundest of heels put out nothing but Freudian doubletalk.

¶ In Paris, an ex-G.I. art student gets money but no warmth from his frozen-faced American mistress, whose chief aim is “to appear strange and interesting and important.”

¶ In Manhattan, a disheartened college boy throws himself into the arms of the Trotskyites after a series of disappointing experiences with his free-necking but grimly virginal girl friend.

In his title story, Farrell comes to the heart of his theme: the American Dream

Girl is the victim of her own publicity. In this case she is a Chicago model unburdening herself in a Pullman to a kindly stranger who sounds just like Author Farrell.

“She lived,” the kindly stranger reflected, “on her illusions of her own charm. If she sat up in such discomfort, she was sitting the way a girl should sit … If she made her face over into a mask, she was beautiful. If she wore a girdle which pinched in her waist . . . she had a beautiful figure. And after . . . modeling and posing in shows and for national magazine ads, after dates, after her night or two a week with her lover, she would go to bed and there lie in terror of something unreal and unseen, and she would get up at all hours and take taxicabs just to be with anyone who would hold her hand [and] tell her she was a good girl and that she wasn’t alone . . . What could life hold for her in a few years, when younger girls would take her place as models and as dates?”

After she went to her berth, “I sat drinking my milk and thinking about tier,” writes Author Farrell. Readers will wish that he had thought longer, or that a sharper writer had done his writing for him. For while Dream Girl is built around a pretentious theme, Author Farrell can muster only nine undercooked stories to support it. His more familiar squalor tales and mass-and-class ruminations pad out the rest of the book, but they justify their intrusion only a couple of times. The Fastest Runner on Sixty-First Street (a sprinting champion who runs straight to his death during a race riot) shows the author at his Chicasro-street-corner best. The Martyr, anti-Communist Farrell’s dissection of what a U.S. Communist writer is up against when he tries to shade the party line, comes as close as anything in recent fiction to making homegrown intellectual Reds human in their fears, fallacies and betrayals.

But Author Farrell’s mealy prose and chronic inability to individualize scene and character muffle most of his stories. In describing a summer stock production in one of the dullest of them, he comes close to summing up his own worst faults:

“[The play] was a crude piece of work, written in the naturalistic manner but without any real feeling or insight . . . The writing was heavy, dull and clumsy; at every point at which there was a need for action, the action slowed down, clogged by words.”