Customer Reviews

James T Farrell: Studs Lonigan a Trilogy (Library of America)

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This still is one of the best "coming of age" novels ever written. I doubt there are many people still around who can relate to many of the things that Studs experienced exactly only due to the fact that they were born too late. This is not the point, however, of a true classic (which this trilogy is). The feelings experienced by Studs, described so freely and naturally, are timeless. The language may be objectionable to some, but have you taken a close listen to many of the Rap lyrics on today's CD's and even on radio? The writing and the storyline flow. Unlike most novels published today, this trilogy is a perfect example of an author getting so deeply into his main character that his public bio becomes indistinguishable from him. I'm sure you'll find that most people will recognize the name Studs Lonigan, but ask them who James Farrell is (outside of the context of the novels) and they'll probably not be able to tell you. Concerns that these novels are racist and anti-semitic seem to me to be a bit naive. This stuff is pretty mild compared to the garbage that your average person is subjected to daily in the print and electronic media. I would still recommend it for inclusion in a high school level honors literature program reading list.

There's really little that one can say about such a classic. Farrell's characters (and there are many, many of them) are true to life. Studs Lonigan especially, and often unfortunately, is true to life. For anyone with Irish and Chicago roots it is an amazing experience.

While the book was originally condemned for its sexual openness, a modern reader will be far more affected by its blatant racism and ethnic intolerance. But this does stand as a true account of the times.

The book itself (Library of America) is a beautiful example of what can still be done in the manner of publication --- makes reading a pleasure.

James T. Farrell's "Studs Lonigan" (1935) is a trilogy which tells the story of the short, unhappy, and brutal life of its title character on the streets of Chicago from 1914 to Lonigan's death at the age of 30 in 1930. The trilogy consists of three separate novels. The first and shortest part of the trilogy, "Young Lonigan" begins with Lonigan's graduation from a Catholic school in the eighth grade. The novel describes the young man's first sexual experience, his decision to drop out of high school, and the beginning of his life as a tough on the streets. The second novel, "The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan" continues the story of Lonigan's deterioration during the years of WW I and thereafter, as Studs becomes a fighter, a predator, sexual and otherwise, a hoodlum, and a drunk while trying to hold a job in his father's painting business. The third volume "Judgment Day" is set during the Great Depression. It chronicles Studs' romance with a young woman, Catherine, his physical deterioration from years of drinking and abuse, and his death from pneumonia and a heart condition, leaving Catherine pregnant and alone. Although Farrell (1904 -- 1979) became a prolific writer and a political activist, he remains known primarily for the Studs Lonigan trilogy, a work of his youth. The Library of America published its edition of "Studs Lonigan" in 2004, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Farrell's birth.

"Studs Lonigan" is a tough, raw naturalistic book which describes life of poor. lower middle class Irish Catholics in Chicago in the first third of the 20th Century. The book owes a great deal to Zola, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser and other naturalistic writers. Studs Lonigan himself has his good qualities but he appears doomed to failure. The trilogy is a coming of age novel and Lonigan a character who barely escapes adolescence. Raised in a Catholic family in which his father tries to push the boy to join his painting business while his mother urges the boy to consider whether he has a calling to be a priest, Studs does not know what he wants to do with himself. He is fated to a life on the streets which will be short. As a boy of 14, Studs falls in love with a girl named Lucy whom he continues to idealize throughout the book. Midway through the trilogy, after he and Lucy have lost touch for some years, Studs takes her to a dance and alienates her permanently by what Lucy finds to be his overly agressive sexual demands. Studs tends to vacilate between the ideal of "nice" untouchable girls and raw, crude sex.
He has great difficulty establishing a relationship with a woman, although Catherine, the girl he seduces near the end of the trilogy, may have been a plausibly good match for him.

The book is filled with the life of the streets and the aimless wandering of young men in gangs. It is full of the life of the poolroom, bars, cheap dancehalls, parks, brothels, and illicit gambling parlors. A striking scene in the book develops from a sexual encounter between Studs and a desparate woman resulting from her losses to a bookie who happens to be Studs' brother-in-law. Studs is a fighter and prides himself on whipping at the age of 16 a fellow-punk named Weary Reilly who, in the course of the trilogy comes to a worse end than Studs himself. Studs' life on the streets is presented against the background of his stultifying and tense family life and of the Catholicism of his family in school and church. The treatment of the Church and of religion in general is highly unsympathetic. The latter portions of the trilogy offer a strong portrayal of the Depression and its impact on the urban poor in Chicago.

Readers today will be most disturbed by the racism and anti-semitism, epithets and sterotypes, that appear on almost every page of "Studs Lonigan" and that are inseparable from the story. The portrayals a crude in the extreme. Farrell does not adopt or endorse the racism or bigotry of his characters but he does give an uncompromising and uncomfortably explicit portrayal of it.

The trilogy is long and Farrell's writing can be wordy and stilted. But as I continued with the book, I became taken with it and with Studs. Lonigan is mostly an unlikeable character, but Farrell shows him in his weakness, provincialism, awkwardness, and vulnerablilty. The book captures its character and era. The Library of America edition is edited by novelist Pete Hamil. It includes sparse textual notes but a good chronology of Farrell's life. The edition also includes a short chapter called "boys and girls" deleted from the initial version of "Young Lonigan" because of its sexually explicit character.

Robin Friedman

That James T. Farrell, author of over fifty books, should be best remembered for his first excursion into naturalism is ironic yet not unparalleled. The Lonigan trilogy teems with the raw experience of Farrell's own youthful days in Chicago, much as Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST teems with Joyce's youthful Dublin.

Unlike several of the reviewers here, I found the Studs Lonigan trilogy to be depressingly contemporary. The sermon given to the young people by the priest in volume two reads like the right-wing press of 2006. The outlook and issues are stunningly unchanged. Similarly, the descriptions in volume three of Studs' quest for employment in a glutted market felt to me very much like my own experiences back in 1981-2 as a floundering, adrift college graduate with no connections, no vision, and no prospects for true employment.

The close-minded, nearly airless world of Studs' stream-of-consciousness is a depressing but wholly believable place. Today's American prejudices may slant more toward the Middle East, but the mindless and cruel biases of Studs lurk barely below the surface of much of America in 2006 like a once-believed-eradicated disease ready to bloom and fully infect when the time is right (much like tuberculosis).

The Depression-era landscape of this trilogy is becoming more and more recognizable as the world of our current economically bifurcated, war-on-terrorized American society. Only the names have changed, slightly. The ignoble, stunted, and doomed Studs is replicating throughout our land, his genes slightly spliced and modified to fit a more technologically sophisticated landscape.

Studs Lonigan, for me, was not fraught with wooden prose and unbridgeable abysses of lost cultures. For me, Farrell's vision is a rippled mirror of today. Studs' parents, sisters, and younger brother are all people I have met and known well. His bars continue to dot the American landscape. The discussions of real estate, stocks, and betting all strike me as being grotesquely relevant.

No empathetic reader can truly love Studs: he can be understood while he is simultaneously abhorred. Yet Studs is not a vanished creature. He is the man of our future, the cockroach to come. He is sitting next to all of us, still smoking cigarettes, still binge drinking--and still willing to hate and to kill, if necessary.

About five years ago I brought the Studs Lonigan trilogy with me to Hawaii. Read it in a week. The thing that struck me the most was Farrell's handling of Studs's interior dialogue. His thoughts mirrored mine when I was his age(s). It was shocking; I thought I was the only person who felt and thought what I had, and to see those thoughts and feelings in print was extemely confronting... and comforting knowing I wasn't alone.

As a relatively young reader, I would never hyave heard about Studs Lonigan if the trilogy had not been listed in the Modern Library's list of the 100 best works of fiction written in English during the 20th century.
I approached the novel with a profound sense of anticipation and actually found much to like in the first novel when Studs in individuating himself as a teenager.
Unfortunately the second and third novels despite having new charcters and influences on Studs, show no development of his psyche and consciosness. He is the same Studs from beginning to end. It took me forever to finish the book, with it's stilted language but I wanted to see why this book was so highly praised.
I can't really understand Farrel's purpose in writing these novels. If he meant to expose the hatred that many Irish Catholic's faced or of the effects of Catholicism on the young, the novels never really accompished what they set out to do. If Farrell had stopped at the end of volume 1, he might have been better regarded as a writer. The last 600 pages plod through to the all too predictable end.
I was tremendously disappointed. I would not recommend this to anyone.