[In this excerpted review of Guillotine Party and Other Stories, Trilling describes Farrell's artistic vision as inadequate to the task of exploring the complexities of modern life.]

Almost all Mr. Farrell's short stories deal with the milieu of the Studs Lonigan trilogy and might almost be chapters of those admirable novels. Indeed, one of the stories is, as Mr. Farrell tells us, the seed from which the cycle grew, and the whole collection seems to be made up of gleanings from the major work.

There can be no doubt of the importance of Farrell's writing. He has brilliantly exploited the theme of poverty, not primarily physical poverty—actual hunger plays small part in his books—but spiritual poverty. His people all live in what one of his few articulate characters calls "a poverty not only of mind but of spirit, even a poverty of the senses, so that they [can] scarcely even look at many things and enjoy them." . . . When we observe the defeat of his characters we also observe the deterioration of communal institutions—the family, the school, the church. The members of Studs's gang die early spiritual—and, indeed, physical—deaths because they are socially betrayed by institutions which have lost their power for good but not their power for harm.

Much of the interest of Farrell's books comes from his care to point out that his people are not done in by crude economic facts so much as by subtle social facts. Studs himself comes from a family that is (until 1929) comfortable and even prospectively wealthy. And we may assure ourselves of the rightness of Farrell's insight by contemplating, for example, the wealthy people of John O'Hara's novels, who are destroyed in much the same way, exhibiting the same incidental cruelties and sexual perversities.

What gives stature to Farrell's work is not merely that he presents the poverty of spirit but that he knows what causes it and what should take its place. He tells us that these people have no loyalty, no recognition of other egos than their own, that they drop a sick man's teeth in the gutter, leave their drunken pals to freeze in the snow, gang-shag, rape, torture the lone and defenseless, desert their gang leaders. These are the people, he is always implying, whom fascism organizes, exploiting their vices and desires, offering them power in terms of their cruelty and immaturity; and whether organized or not, he is saying, their debasement stands as a perpetual denial of the vaunt of culture and the intellect.

Yet, when the importance of Farrell's theme is understood, it is fair to ask whether he has made literature which is, in the sense in which Matthew Arnold used the word, adequate. Does it, that is, so synthesize modern life, or enough of it, as to give us emotional clarity? Admitting all that Farrell's books do, it is hard to feel that they do this.

Adequacy to modern life comes in two ways: from presenting an organized view of a scene so full and complex that it gives the reader a sense of understanding the principle behind the chaos of life . . . or it comes from presenting a situation in which the characters are able to act, even mistakenly, with some measure of ethical principle and free will and, by acting, to affirm the qualities essential to decent human life. . . .

Farrell's books are adequate in neither of these two ways. The segment of society which he presents is, as we have said, suggestive, even revelatory; but though it aids our understanding it does not sufficiently give the sense of the principle behind complexity in modern life; it is too simple, and complexity is not supplied by the introduction of the Insull débâcle or a Communist parade. Nor can Farrell's people be engaged in morally significant action, because the essence of the truth about them is that society has robbed them of principles and free will. Their action is ultimately induced by wills other than their own and it can only have elementary—however important—historical or sociological meaning. Whoever reads about these people is accepting an invitation to regard them with sympathy but always at a remove, from above looking down.

The limitations of Mr. Farrell's theme and treatment are perhaps better seen in his short stories than in his novels, for in the novels there is quasi-action in the passage of time, and the overexpansion of detail may pass for complexity. The short story, if it is not to be a mere sketch, must be the record of sharp and critical resolutions; it must turn brevity to account by using symbols; and its finest charm lies in telling more than it seems to say. But Mr. Farrell's stories tell scarcely more than the elementary fact, though they tell it sharply: a young priest loses his faith and breaks his vows; a young husband struggles to be happy in his poverty-threatened marriage; students in a parochial school are inflamed against pacifism; the Merry Clouters torture a Negro boy, then desert their leaders in a gang fight; a Greek leaves his Arcadian flocks and becomes a Marathon dancer in America. And so on with the forceful underscoring of observed facts which can never be sufficiently underscored but which, of themselves, do not make a literature adequate to modern life. Yet there is so much awareness in Mr. Farrell (his later novels exhibit it better than these stories) and so much power of growth (the superiority of the novels to the stories attests it, for most of the stories predate the best of the novels) that one can be confident that he will see this for himself.