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The honorable menace: a new centennial biography of James T. Farrell seeks to revive the truculent author of Studs Lonigan--and to make a neocon of him.

Article Excerpt
IN 1954, JAMES T. FARRELL PUBLISHED a collection of essays called Reflections at Fifty. It is long since out of print, like most of his novels and, so far as I can tell, all of his nonfiction volumes. Digging it out now, Reflections is a re minder of what the author of Studs Lonigan was like--or rather, of how he wished to present himself--halfway to his centennial, which we mark this year.

A fitting shorthand expression for that role would be the "Great American Novelist." One of the pleasures, as well as the frustrations, of reading Farrell is that the cliche fits so neatly. By 1954, some 20 years had passed since the days when the Studs Lonigan trilogy appeared, followed by several other novels chronicling life in the Irish 'hood during the first three decades of the century. Each novel cut its slices of life pretty close to the bone. The combination of sex, coarse language, and low-life insouciance made his fiction seem a kind of menace to the public order. When the first volume of the Lonigan series appeared in 1932,...

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