Customer Reviews

Studs Lonigan

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Farrell's groundbreaking work is perhaps the best example of American naturalism that we have. It is the story of the rather brief life of the working class Irish protagonist, Studs, who grows up and comes to manhood on the South Side of Chicago. Studs lives through poverty and the Depression, but not without paying a terrible psychic price. Through a relentless piling up of detail, Farrell is able to convincingly present his thesis, that social, political, cultural, and most of all economic forces conspire to decisively shape human character and choice.

The novel unflinchingly portrays the violence, chauvanism, and racism that pervades the lives of Studs and his friends. They despise those more privileged than themselves, have complete contempt for women, and fiercely distrust anyone from outside their neighborhood, particularly those with a different skin color. They wear their toughness with pride and have no patience for expressions of sensitivity or remorse.

Yet from the opening chapter, Farrell takes pains to show that the young Lonigan is not immune to feelings of tenderness and even love. His portrayal of Studs' romantic adolescent longing for Lucy is convincing and touching, and the author's presentation of it early in the book makes more convincing his documentation of Studs' progressively hardening view of life.

Another key element of the trilogy is its sketching of a character increasingly dwarfed by forces beyond his control and understanding. In one key scene, Studs, close to despair as he feels his life slipping away from him, stands by the shores of Lake Michigan and watches the waves pound against the rocks. It's a beautifully naturalistic scene: Farrell uses the images of real life to create symbols of Studs' feelings of helplessness in a world he doesn't understand.

The trilogy is primarily about loss. Farrell, I believe, felt that it was difficult for boys like Studs to escape their fate, but he did not feel it was impossible. What was required was character of a sterner stuff than Studs possessed. Studs comes to stand for a generation that wasted its potential on alcohol, petty crime, and on a foolish pursuit of the quick buck. Where imagination was required to dream up a world different than the one to which he was born, Studs settled for the here and now, and it cost him dearly.

"Studs Lonigan" takes the reader into a world that Farrell knew firsthand. He makes you live in the world of doomed youth and refuses to pull any punches, right up until the last page has been turned.

Not since Dreiser's, "An American Tragedy", have I read a book that described the spiritual depravity of teen age youth and the ignorance that accompanies it. Farrell's masterpiece made the top 100 for this century at #29 and certainly deserves its place there.

The book is actually three shorter books combined into one massive saga about a young man named Bill "Studs" Lonigan. Studs is a Catholic, Irish-American who lives in the rough and tumble neighborhood of Chicago during the early portion of this century. The story starts off with Studs being 15 and thinking he knows everything and willing to prove it with his fists. Dropping out of high school to hang around a pool room, he and his friends primarily engage in fights, drinking and picking up women.

Studs is the leader of his friends and always feels the need to prove himself by fighting and out drinking them. Despite hearing lectures from his priest about the dangers of drink and sex, he continues to engage in these activities. However, time takes it toll on Studs's health. By 1930, the Depression and his failing health (from his activities in his 20's) force him to realize that he isn't the man who used to be.

Farrell depicts the turbulent times perfectly. The reader is draw into the descriptions and accounts of Chicago at the end of the first World War, the socialist movement, the rise in popularity of Sinclair Lewis, and many other events. The roaring 20's are also written about and the reader is taken through gambling halls, speakeasies, and whore houses. Farrell paints a very bleak picture of the Depression as well.

While there doesn't seem to be many answers in the book, it does depict that ignorance and a lack of spirituality wreaks havoc upon lives. While it is one thing to have religious rules and regulations, it is another to live them. The reader can be intimidated by the page count, but it is well worth reading. It easily made my list for one of the 10 best books I've read in my lifetime.

One reason I love this book is it gives me the feeling of being in a specific time and place. I've read about the Twenties and Thirties--Frederick Lewis Allen's _Only Yesterday_--but _Studs Lonigan_ brings it alive. James T. Farrell takes me into a dance marathon, a movie palace, a Knights of Columbus initiation and somehow tells me the things I want to know so that I have the illusion of understanding what it was really like to be there.

James T. Farrell paints a picture for me far better than, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald. I never really understand what's going on in Fitzgerald's stories. He takes it for granted you are living in the Twenties and know what they're all about. Farrell _shows_ me the Twenties.

_Studs Lonigan_ will either leave you cold or grab you. If it grabs you, you will find that it's the kind of book you just lose yourself in. It will become your world for a few days.

He builds layer on layer of prosaic detail. He seems to me to be exceptionally honest about what everyday life is really like. One poignant passage near the end of _Young Lonigan_ describing the day the fifteen-year-old Studs spends in the park with Lucy, as his thoughts dart from one topic to another.

One moment his thoughts are exalted: "He took squints at everything from different angles and watched how their appearances would change... he listened to the sound of the park, and it seemed as if they were all, somehow, part of himself, and he was part of them, and them and himself were free from the drag of his body that had aches and dirty thoughts, and got sick, and could only be in one place at a time...."

The next, they are romantic: "They sat. Studs swinging his legs, and Lucy swinging hers, she chattering, himself not listening to it, only know it was nice, and that she laughed and talked and was like an angel, and she was an angel playing in the sun." Then, the next instant "Suddenly, he thought of feeling her up, and he told himself that he was a bastard for having such thoughts..."

It is, for me at least, intensely evocative of my inner experience when I was that age. The passage is tragic, too. "Time passed through their afternoon like a gentle, tender wind, and like death that was silent and cruel. They knew they ought to go, and they sat." It is the only time Studs is with Lucy. She is his great lost love--like the little red-haired girl in Charles Shultz's _Peanuts_--and he is haunted by her throughout the rest of the trilogy.

I love Farrell's dialogue, the way his characters say dull, stupid things that ring true. Part of Farrell's technique involves hearing similar words and opinions echoing from character to character. I can't think of any other writer who does this. Studs' smooth-talking friend Ike touts him into buying stock: "Fellows, I'm not kidding. Listen, I work for Imbray and I know. You know what's behind these stocks? Well, I'll tell you. All, or nearly all, the public utilities of the Middle West and the brain of a man like Solomon Imbray. What more security could you want?" A few chapters later, he has lost half his money and is unable to make his father a loan. His father says "God, Bill! Imbray stock is as shaky as a reed in the wind," and poor Studs says, lamely: "I thought that since it is based on public utilities, and with a smart man like Solomon Imbray controlling it, it would be safe."

Incidentally, _Studs Lonigan_ is wonderful for reading aloud.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about "Studs Lonigan" is its prescience, which still hovers over all of us more than sixty years later.

Sadly, the book seems to have fallen into obscurity, slipping into the cracks that separate one decade from another. If not for Modern Library's recent list, I myself would have remained oblivious to what I can only describe as a work of art. I make no bones about that. I am not proud of it, and lament "what has become of education" that someone can walk through college without stumbling over this book or having it thrust into his lap by every other drommate, the other half of whom clutch "Catcher in the Rye" to their chests as if in ignorance of the fact that, were their copy stolen, another could easily and cheaply be found at the local bookstore. "Why have I never heard of this book before?" I continually asked myself. Why is this book not more widely read, nor found in more bookstores, on more reading lists? Dammit, great literature such as this should not simply fall to the wayside, tossed to the side of the road through the open window of a speeding car like an apple core freshly eaten and so readily disposed of. Forget "Catcher in the Rye." It says nothing that this book does not say ten times better.

Read "Studs Lonigan." It is long, yes, but well worth the time.

Of course there is self-pity, but too much of this amounts to contempt. Studs Lonigan is a stark, murderous story of things going wrong and continuing to go wrong until life seems too hard and one is pushed to the limits of giving up. What made this book even more powerful for me was that I didn't much care for it after about 70 pages. The characters seemed cardboard, the dialogue is a frazzled series of cliches of punks trying to imitate tough guys in books and in movies and their own personalities don't seem to fit. And it goes on like this, for 800 more pages. But the change comes when you see these lapses for what they are: genuine lapses in the character's imaginations; an inability to be anything real, to have true thoughts or actual ideas other than trying to imitate people who never were (or, if they were, have become so mythologized as to be unrecognizable).

Studs is a shy, brooding boy with a head full of dreams and no conception of responsibility. He wanders around waiting for something to happen to him yet being unable to initiate anything. He passes through his life hoping things will improve. They don't, nothing improves, life continues to get harder and harder and things grow worse and worse. There are the prejudices, easy excuses for what went wrong that crop up when one refuses to blame themselves for their failures, but even in this Studs remains true, if not to himself, than to the expectations we have for him from the very start of the book.

A stark view of realism Studs Lonigan, I believe, outshines some of the more celebrated examples of this style such as An American Tragedy or Babbitt simply because nothing extraordinary ever happens to Studs. He is a boring person, a complete failure who for the scant thirty years of his life never moves out of his parents' home, never pursues a career and never ceases to see himself as someone other than who he actually is. He is a dreamer, sure; a romantic dreamer with the best of intentions and not a single idea in his head. Constantly people are blathering their contrary opinions to Studs and he finds himself agreeing with everyone, waiting for someone to explain how things truly are. And he continues to wait, continues to yearn all the while growing older and coming to realize that nothing he hopes for will ever come true.

The prose is lingo-heavy, filled with scattered phrases from the era in which it was written which adds greater verasimillitude to the situations. The emotional intensity of the story builds progressively and I found myself growing increasingly moved by the multiplying disappointments and the ruin of everyone involved. What comes as the sharpest stroke of the novel is that Studs, for all his failings, comes across as fundementally the most decent person in the world of the book. He doesn't truly love or hate anything, only focuses his interest on people long enough to see how they fit in to his view of reality, but this is not so much from selfishness but from a need to be told how to live. He joins in with hating blacks or Jews or Communists or anyone causing apparent trouble to any of his friends but also can turn around and sympathize with the plight of the underprivilaged and the down-on-their-luck. He is a contradiction, fundamentally, as it is as a result of this, as a result of his timid acceptance of everything that happens, that keeps him in the same place he was when he was an ignorant child dreaming of being the toughest kid on the block.

A wonderful book that will leave me depressed for quite some time, no doubt.

I will leave it to others to give you a synopsis of the trilogy. My purpose is to dispel some misperceptions regarding Lonigan and his community. First, the neighborhood of Studs Lonigan was middle class. Lonigan's family ( as many others in the neighborhood) had moved there from working class, immigrant neighborhoods to the northwest. The Washington Park neighborhood of Studs' time was on the way up. Likewise, the residents saw themselves that way. This fact alone makes Studs more of a tragic figure,in my opinion. He DID have advantages (economically,socially) due to his environment but squandered them.

Second, a point Farrell makes about this upwardly mobile Irish community is that they are really not better than the blacks who move in to the community, displacing them. They do not possess a higher moral ground exclusive of other racial or ethnic groups.

I think putting the people in the context of place and time, this trilogy is really about the deterioration of communities (families, neighborhoods)that truly lack soul and spirit.

I would strongly recommend reading the works of Edgar Marquess Branch, a Chicagoan and Farrell scholar.

As a personal note, for a number of years I lived and worked in areas adjacent to where the actions occur. You can still see some landmarks mentioned in the novels. If in Chicago, your enjoyment of the story would be enhanced by visiting the areas around Washington Park. Note that the areas are undergoing economic renewal. You may see long-abandoned buildings standing next to recently rehabilitated ones.

The "Studs Lonigan" trilogy, James T. Farrell's forgotten masterwork, deserves a new generation of readers desiring assurance that ours is not the first generation to experience the hopelessness of youth without direction and life without purpose. The three self-standing novels follow the youth, adolescence, and manhood of a Chicago Irish-Catholic named William "Studs" Lonigan. What shocked readers when the novels were first published in the early 1930s--a brutal street life characterized by cigarettes and alcohol, senseless violence and casual sex--strikes the reader today for the directness and honesty with which Farrell treats the lives of lower-middle-class youth caught up in the whirlwind of social and economic transformations that followed the First World War.

Despite his self-destruction, Studs remains a sympathetic character. Unlike some of his friends, he does, at least occasionally, have a clue as to what is bringing him to his "Judgment Day" (the title of the last novel). Even so, conquering the limitations of his upbringing, which are only compounded by the miseries of the Depression, remains an overwhelming challenge.

Farrell's Chicago is as important a character as Studs. The city is a living organism that grows, changes, shows its beauties (in some of the author's most lyrical moments), threatens, and, ultimately, continues to exist oblivious of its inhabitants.

Perhaps Farrell overdoes the slang, and occasionally a scene is all too predictable. But not always, especially as Studs comes to adulthood and is increasingly torn by conflicting temptations and an ingrained desire for respectability.

Together with John Dos Passos, his better-
remembered contemporary, James Farrell has captured a memorable segment of American life with techniques that include variations on Dos Passos' newreels. Unlike the author of "U.S.A.", however, Farrell leaves us with a memorable character who demands our attention just as forcibly as when he was a cake-eater walking Chicago's Fifty-eighth Street.

Not since Dreiser's, "An American Tragedy", have I read a book that described the spiritual depravity of teen age youth and the ignorance that accompanies it. Farrell's masterpiece made the top 100 for this century at #29 and certainly deserves its place there.

The book is actually three shorter books combined into one massive saga about a young man named Bill "Studs" Lonigan. Studs is a Catholic, Irish-American who lives in the rough and tumble neighborhood of Chicago during the early portion of this century. The story starts off with Studs being 15 and thinking he knows everything and willing to prove it with his fists. Dropping out of high school to hang around a pool room, he and his friends primarily engage in fights, drinking and picking up women.

Studs is the leader of the gang is always feels the need to prove himself by fighting and out drinking his friends. Despite hearing lectures from his priest about the dangers of drink and sex, he continues to engage in these activities. However, time takes it toll on Studs's health. By 1930 the Depression and his failing health (from his activities in his 20's) force him to realize that he isn't the man who used to be.

Farrell depicts the turbulent times perfectly. The reader is draw into the descriptions and accounts of Chicago at the end of the first World War, the socialist movement, the rise in popularity of Sinclair Lewis, and many other events. The roaring 20's are also written about and the reader is taken through gambling halls, speakeasies, and whore houses. Farrell paints a very bleak picture of the Depression as well.

While there doesn't seem to be many answers in the book, it does depict that ignorance and a lack of spirituality wreaks havoc upon lives. While it is one thing to have religious rules and regulations, it is another to live them. The reader can be intimidated by the page count on the book, but it is well worth reading. It easily made my list for one of the 10 best books I've read in my lifetime.

Many a person may be intimidated by the length of this great work of literature, and never take the time to read it. Do not be one of those unfortunate souls. This book is truly not to be missed.

While pieces of the book focus on depression era politics and problems (for a more detailed analysis of the plot, see Mike O Farrell's review below), the themes that run throughout this novel have been with us since the very beginning of time. At its heart, this story is about a young man who has always imagined greatness for himself. He lives deep inside the recesses of his own mind (as we all do) and accordingly finds it hard to believe that he is not unique, somehow different from all of his friends, family, and acquaintances. James T. Farrell's tragedy unfolds as Studs slowly comes to realize that he is just another guy, making his own way through this life and trying to make just a little bit of sense out of it all.

If you have come to literature to find some answers, this is probably not your book. Like all great novelists, Farrell is simply showing you the way he sees things, and bringing up enough raw material from the detritus of life to make you stop, and think, and wonder.

If you are looking for a plot driven story, then this may not satisfy. However, if you do not approach the story with the same kind of expectations you might bring to a work of popular fiction, Farrell maintains a high level of interest. I believe Studs Lonigan is one of the most developed characters in twentieth century American fiction. I am especially impressed that this depiction comes across so strongly without the aid of contrived catastrophes that land on the character from out of the blue. Although Studs is affected by his environment, it is still possible to trace the turns his life takes to sources within his own personality. These sources determine him as often as they are determined by him. I found him to be neither beneath nor above me. I can't say the book is exciting so much as extremely moving. Either way, I was turning the pages late into the night.Definately a book I will remember all my life.