Books: Neighborhood Novelist

NO STAR IS LOST—James T. Farrell—Vanguard ($3).

Few regions in the U. S. have been as carefully described as the narrow rectangle of Chicago streets that lies between 25th and 71st Streets, between Wabash and Stony Island Avenues. Born there 34 years ago, James Thomas Farrell has made it the scene of five long novels, including his 1,108-page trilogy, Studs Lonigan, has harped steadily on the fights and brawls that have raged on its vacant lots, in its schoolyards and alleys, in its schoolrooms, poolrooms, bedrooms and parlors.

The unblinking realism of Farrell’s pictures of lower-class life made critics overlook their monotony, their repetitions, and the fact that all the characters seemed to divide their time between languid day dreaming and fierce battling with other dreamers. When he finished his Studs Lonigan trilogy three years ago, admirers hoped he might get away from 71st Street and its overly pugnacious inhabitants. But when he began another and longer series of novels laid in the same neighborhood, with characters akin to the Lonigans, but poorer and more quarrelsome, it seemed that James Farrell was obsessed with the dreariness of life in the section where he had grown up. First volume of the new series, A World I Never Made, told of Jim O’Neill, a goodhearted, leather-faced teamster, and his shrill, shapeless, ill-natured wife Lizz. It broke off when the O’Neills collected $1,000 after their son was run over. Written in the same slow tempo as Farrell’s earlier works, with characters who were fatuous when they were not brutal, it gave an even more dispiriting picture of a sodden, sullen, sick environment, revealed no new facet of either Farrell’s talent or of the life of the neighborhood.

Last week the second volume dealing with the O’Neills did both. The best of James Farrell’s books to date, No Star Is Lost is also his mellowest and most imaginative, has little of the rancor (so strong that it sometimes seemed Author Farrell hated all his characters and all their kin) that marred his previous novels. No Star Is Lost begins in 1914, when the O’Neills are penniless again, when the family has grown to include two daughters and five sons, and when young Danny O’Neill is living with the grandmother in the comparative luxury of an apartment. The new light it throws on the environment is in its picture of the poverty of the O’Neills, with their excitement on payday, when they know they will get meat for supper, and their painful struggle to keep up some outward respectability in a world where they cannot pay their bills or get credit. And although the characters fight, insult each other, get drunk, beat the children, curse the Jews and the neighbors, they also make desperate efforts to get along better, to be patient and keep sober, so that their explosions seem pathetic rather than vicious.

New light the book sheds on Farrell’s talent is in its scenes of childhood, with the O’Neill children playing their endless, elaborate, imaginative games, killing imaginary Mexicans, fanning imaginary big-league batters, meanwhile warily watching adults who may be good-natured, or who may knock them around. Their biggest adventure comes when their Aunt Margaret, in her drunken despondency, tries to commit suicide and take three of them with her. Evading a bigger danger than imaginary Indians, they spend a wild night turning off gas jets which she has left open, doze off to find they are attacked again, finally threaten to brain her with a baseball bat. With several such scenes and a climax of a diphtheria epidemic which kills one little O’Neill, No Star Is Lost is mellow only in comparison with the unqualified brutality of Farrell’s earlier books. Tender-minded readers are likely to be horrified at its candor, at Author Farrell’s painstaking documentation on the long, dirty thoughts of youth. But followers of his work will recognize that he has begun to regard his neighbors with a more tolerant and kindlier eye.