Volume 2, Number 11 · July 9, 1964
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
By Robert M. Adams
What Time Collects
by James T. Farrell
Doubleday, 421 pp., $5.95
The Rector of Justin
by Louis Auchincloss
Houghton Mifflin, 341 pp., $4.95
The President
by R.V. Cassill
Simon and Schuster, 316 pp., $4.95
Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday
by Mary Lee Settle
Viking, 217 pp., $4.50
Criticism has been having its way with James T. Farrell for so long now, that there seems little point in putting more energy into what has been said for the past thirty years. Reduced to its simplicity, it is just that the man can't write readable stories. Why, in the face of this amply registered opinion, he continues to undertake ever bigger, longer, and heavier narrative projects, is one of the mysteries of the age. It seems like only yesterday that the first volume of a projected four-volume autobiography was being hailed as a paralyzing bore. Now we are already two volumes deep into another four-volume saga, this one dealing with existence in the suburbs of Chicago between 1870 and 1920. What Time Collects must surely be ranked among the most vulnerable titles of the current season; I shall leave each reader to make his own jokes on it, and observe simply that the mixture is here very much as before. The characters are seedy semi-respectables with no perspectives and little shrewdness, the locale is drab, and the prose an odd combination of Victor Appleton and Horatio Alger:
Review, 2163 words
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