[In the following excerpted review, Phillips observes that several of Farrell's more recent short stories are among his best short fiction.]

Childhood Is Not Forever [is] a selection of stories written largely in the 1950s. While all the tales are not as impressive as the last novel [A Brand New Life], or many of Farrell's fine earlier stories such as "The Scarecrow" and "Calico Shoes", the collection does not deserve the indifference it has been met with in the popular press.

Most of Farrell's large body of work has been written with purpose and from a perspective. Childhood Is Not Forever fills in some of the cracks between his interrelated novels, especially the Eddie Ryan and Danny O'Neill cycles. Both characters are encountered within these stories. The book is also more overtly political than Mr. Farrell's recent novels, with the McCarthy era, the Bolshevik revolution, and Adlai Stevenson's campaigns all serving as occasions for fiction.

But, as the collection's title implies, the most important agent in the stories is Time, which robs us of opportunities, changes all things, separates souls, and tyrannizes over us. A story such as "Reunion Abroad", for instance, a tapestry woven about the disparity between appearance and reality, is ultimately a statement on time's corruption of us all. The title story is a memorable portrait of a bigot and would-be politician, a man who resists change in any form. He sees all Europe as a rathole and all Democrats as Stalinists. He would like everything to be just as it was when he grew up in Chicago, and resents any changes time has wrought in his friends. Yet his enemy is essentially kind to him, for he dies an early death, being spared further disillusionment. Yet had he known he would die young, he would have feared time all the more.

"Monologue of an Old Pitcher" portrays yet another man out of sympathy with the times he lives in. It is a short character study of one who deplores the lack of respect for tradition and the absence of proper hero-worship by today's youth. Yet Farrell's monologue ends with a twist: the pitcher claims the 1920's to be the best of all times to have been young, because that was when Al Capone was alive.

Loneliness pervades the lives of Farrell's gallery of characters. "Sunday Evening" explores the loneliness of a writer's life, and posits the thesis that the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era crippled much creativity in America. "Small-Town Taxi Cab Driver" portrays a man of faith who lives a life with little to hope for, while in "Vivian Thanks God", a woman longing for romantic fulfillment in life sublimates her desire through her children. "Jump to Chicago" is the story of a weak-willed man trapped by his occupation and his appetites. His release is through digging his grave with a fork. Not all of Farrell's characters find a form of sublimation, however. "Ray Taite" is a more overtly naturalistic story, in the tradition of Farrell's earliest novels, showing the roots which determined the future of two boyhood playmates, each "traveling separate roads toward a future that controlled them".

The collection's finest story, and one which deserves to be preserved, is "Native's Return", a long piece uniting the three dominant strains of loneliness, politics, and the tyranny of time found in the shorter stories. It is a fitting conclusion to the volume. Highly autobiographical, "Native's Return" explores one day in the life of a writer named Edward H. Ryan (James T. Farrell). Ryan's return to Chicago as a celebrity triggers comment on the inexorable flow of time and events, and America's propensity for treating the vulgar and trivial with the same gravity accorded the genuine and important. With high seriousness, the story exposes the financial insecurities of a very good writer in America, and shows how a person who is, at least in the homes of the well-educated, a household word can wonder where next week's groceries will come from. The story captures completely the temper of the 1950s. The middle-aged writer throwing handfuls of Stevenson buttons into a crowd which doesn't even bother to pick them up is a powerful synecdoche. The defeat of Stevenson and all he stood for parallels the defeat of the artist and the intellectual in America.

Though Childhood Is Not Forever is not one of Farrell's major books, nor even a consistently good book of stories, this reviewer welcomes its appearance in the Farrell canon, And "Native's Return", "Jump to Chicago", and "Ray Taite" deserve a place beside Farrell's best short fiction.