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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting Middle-Class Counterpoint to Studs Lonigan, March 1, 2001
I think this books' story of a boy growing up will actually strike chords with more readers than does Studs Lonigan trilogy (as extraordinary as that is). This book gets into the heart of a boy's feelings, hopes, fears, dreams, better than almost any book I've read. Like Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Joy in the Morning about Frankie Nolan's young life, this novel is simply able to put you into the boy and remind you of your own childhood. It also recalls the real terror of awaiting parental corporal punishment! It's that vivid.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great starting point for the Chicago Lit student, March 6, 2008
Before I moderated a panel at this year's Printer's Row Book Fair, my only experience with James T. Farrell was the first novel of his Studs Lonigan trilogy, Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in Chicago Streets. In his own words, Farrell balances the life of Studs Lonigan with the life of Danny O'Neill in this first novel of the O'Neill/Flaherty pentalogy. In the introduction to A World I Never Made, Charles Fanning Farrell writes that Farrell created, in Danny O'Neill, "a character whose life experience [was] to be precisely the opposite of Studs. "Danny and Studs," in Farrell's words, "will stand as I conceived them-dialectical opposites in their destinies-one goes up, the other goes down." If you're looking for the fluid, tight, lyrical prose of a poet, you won't find much of that in any of the eight novels that make up these two collections. Despites Farrell's scholarly approach to his non fiction writing, the fiction here is written in the plain and austere prose you might expect from any randomly selected lower middle class resident of Chicago's south side Irish community in the early 1900s. At the Printer's Row Book Fair, I asked Fanning to touch on Farrell's choice to write in this style. Fanning spoke of the literary establishment's reluctance to accept Farrell for this very reason. In his introduction, Fanning writes that Farrell wanted to create a narrative voice that would "speak for people who cannot easily speak for themselves." "For this prodigiously gifted intellectual," Fanning writes, "encyclopedically well read and fiercely committed to the life of the mind, the forging of this style was likely a heroic effort of will." A World I Never Made is a great starting point for the reader interested in exploring the Chicago literary tradition.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A world to visit, May 7, 2007
The Danny O'Neill books are, at once, one of the great evocations of childhood, the great coming of age novels and the great works of naturalism in our literature. They were, for me, utterly enthralling, enthralling, as well as enlightening, reading throughout; but some have found that the full tetrology gets repetitive as one goes forward through nearly twenty years, and 2,000 pages of Danny's life and times. (If Lonigan is better it's because it has more cumulative punch as an integrated work, though Farrell's artistry is, chapter by chapter and volume by volume, at a high peak in the O'Neill books. For those inclined to make the journeys, A World I Never Made, is definitely the best introduction to the series. For those looking for the best of the batch, I'd recommend the starting out with both incredibly charming and intense -- and Lonigan linked-- "No Star is Lost," reportedly soon forthcoming from the U. of I. Press. For lit heads and Farrell fans happy with a single addition from Farrell to the American canon's Lonigan trilogy, "No Star is Lost" is probably it. Tom Sawyer eat your heart out!
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