Customer Reviews

JUDGMENT DAY

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Over the past several years, as part of re-evaluating the effect of my half-Irish diaspora heritage (on my mother's side) on the development of my leftist political consciousness I have read, and in some cases re-read, some of the major works of the Irish American experience. Of course, any such reading list includes tales from the pen of William Kennedy and his Albany sagas, most famously "Ironweed". And, naturally, as well the tales of that displaced Irishman, the recently departed Frank McCourt and his "Angela's Ashes", a story that is so close to the bone of my own "shanty" Irish upbringing that we are forever kindred spirits. That said, here to my mind is the "max daddy" of all the American disapora storytellers, James T. Farrell, and his now rightly famous trilogy, "Studs Lonigan" (hereafter, "Studs").

And in his storytelling of his people, the Chicago Irish, Farrell does not let us down. "Studs" is only marginally concerned with political issues, and then only of the bourgeois kind rampant amount the Irish in the early part of the 20th century when they were taking over local politics in a number of cities from their WASP guardians. However, he has hit so many "hot buttons" about "lace curtain" Irish sensibilities and the struggle against "shanty" Irishness that he, Kennedy, and McCourt could have easily compared notes for their respective works.

In the old suburban Boston Irish neighborhood where I grew up there were four basic male figures who dominated the local life, stage Irish if you will, but present nevertheless-the beat cop, the local gangster, the on-the-make politician, and the parish priest. We kids, at least, treated them all the same with a certain cynicism, maybe a less so for the priest, depending on your age and the gravity of the sins that you carried around. Beyond those figures were the rest of us, trying to get by the day as best we could. Studs Lonigan is one of us, although, perhaps a little more full of himself than we were.

As we come to this third book of the trilogy with the advent of "Studs'" maturity, complete with the pressing adult problems with which we are all familiar; job security, money, women, marriage, and so on, and with and his demise, after what seems to have been a too short life one can say with certainty that he was a classic underachiever, except perhaps, in his day dreams. This type we too know from the old neighborhood, a little too closely at times. The old neighborhood was always filled with half-wise, "street smart" guys who spend more time dreaming than doing. However, it took James T. Farrell to fill in the blanks of that kind of life for his generation, and for ours as well. That is what makes these three books, an over one thousand page march, great literature.