It May Be Dated But It's Still Very Relevant

books:


	• James T Farrell: Studs Lonigan a Trilogy (Library of America) James T. Farrell Library of America, 2004 - 1024 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

Studs goes to Hawaii

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.

It May Be Dated But It's Still Very Relevant

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.

for more information click here

Greatness Circumscribed

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.

for more information click here

An unparalleled example of American naturalism, the Studs Lonigan trilogy follows the hopes and dissipations of its remarkable main character?a would-be ?tough guy? and archetypal adolescent, born to Irish-American parents on Chicago?s South Side?through the turbulent years of World War I, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression. The three novels?Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day?offer a vivid sense of the textures of real life: of the institutions of Catholicism, the poolroom and the dance marathon, romance and marriage, gangsterism and ethnic rivalry, and the slang of the street corner. Cited as an inspiration by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Frank McCourt, Studs Lonigan stands as a masterpiece of social realism in the ranks of John Steinbeck?s The Grapes of Wrath and Theodore Dreiser?s An American Tragedy.

for more information click here