Customer Reviews

Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy Containing Young Lonigan, the Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, Judgment Day.

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James T. Farrell is a first-class writer, whose Studs Lonigan Trilogy is a five-star book, which I cannot, in good faith, recommend.

There's no point to it. It is one-thousand pages of so-what. The dividends do not justify the investment. With limited time on this planet, and better books extant, one should give Studs the go-by and turn one's attention elsewhere.

The book is a realistic bildungsroman about a very human character, whose existence matters for naught. Maybe that was Farrell's point...here is an average guy, a nondescript Joe, a face-in-the-crowd, and we are going to spend fifteen years with him. In that sense, it is very reminiscent of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, a book which is marginally better than Lonigan--and half as long--but still, all things considered, rather...superfluous.

(Bellow and Farrell strike me as very similar writers...guys with more persistence than talent.)

You're not missing anything if you don't read either. (As opposed to works like Lolita and Under the Volcano--the latter which I can't even say I "enjoyed"...but, boy, was it numinous!)

Sensitive types should be aware that Farrell makes liberal use of the dreaded word-that-begins-with-the-letter-that-comes-between-"m"-and-"o," (i.e. "NIGGER"), along with epithets for Jews, Slavs, etc. (But on the plus side for the politically correct, Farrell was a socialist!)

The Studs Lonigan Trilogy has been deemed by the MLA to be the 29th best novel of the 20th century. I don't think that is the case, but I suppose it merits inclusion somewhere on the list.

I should add--almost apologetically--that Studs is extremely readable, and captures the milieu and the zeitgeist very well--but upon completion, you may feel like you've just eaten a whole sleeve of Saltines.