Mr. Farrell's new book [French Girls Are Vicious and Other Stories] is a collection of nine short stories, four with settings in Europe and five in America. The title must have been selected for the paper-back reprint certain to appear soon; for Farrell is one of the most successful writers for the drugstore soft-back set, New American Library reporting that it has sold over 5 million copies of his books. In any case, the title promises more than the book delivers; for the stories are quiet character studies, often little more than sketches.

The subject matter of none of these stories will seem new to Farrell's readers, and there is little in their telling that sets them apart. On the other hand, although it is expended in very small quantities, the power of Farrell's other work is present here—a power that derives from an absolute devotion to fact, a steady but grim-mouthed determination to tell the truth.

In the appealing testimony Farrell gave in the Philadelphia censorship trial in 1948, he said:

. . . realism to me . . . is to attempt an exploration of the nature of experience, to see experience directly, to see it unflinchingly. . . . So my effort has been to present life as it is, insofar as I can see it, to present it in terms of the patterns of destiny, the patterns of language, and the patterns of thought and consciousness, which I can grasp and open. . . .

When to this ideal of "honesty" we add Farrell's active and individually free social conscience, his wide and sympathetic knowledge of the world's literature, his critical concern with the objectives and methods of literary naturalism, and the unhumorous earnestness with which he takes himself and his work, he emerges as both a "dedicated spirit" and a most appealing man.

The 27 books which have preceded this one represent both in quantity and content an achievement that is strangely neglected today by serious critics. Yet this neglect is not hard to understand, for even so small a segment of his work as French Girls Are Vicious suggests two of Farrell's primary weaknesses.

The first is his theory that the language of naturalistic fiction should be the language actually used by characters on the cultural level being described. In this book, for example, he has an American government clerk in Paris tell her story in a jargon drawn from her days in "statistical economic research," and the result, although mildly ironic, is stultifying. Here, as in the bulk of his work, language has not been used to describe character or to reveal it by ironic use; it has been used mechanically and with deadening effect because of the arbitrary limits that Farrell imposes upon himself. If the variety of language from the cultural illiteracy of Young Lonigan to the sociological complexity of Yet Other Waters is examined, one sees that Farrell's theory of language not only denies him a personal style but also "flats" the effectiveness of many of his stories.

The second weakness is Farrell's theory that he should show life in terms of "patterns of thought and consciousness." Whether a character narrates the story, as five do in this collection, or Farrell speaks directly is not significant: the stories always come to us through the narrow limits of the consciousness of one or two characters.

Inevitably Farrell shows us the impact of environment and action on inner selves. This is not an artistic defect in itself, but a virtue; yet Farrell, who is interested in an almost sociological construct of society, in using this narrative technique loses environmental precision.

This is the reason that it finally matters little in this collection whether the stories are laid in Paris or Venice or New York or Chicago: the minds that tell the stories do not change with the environmental shifts. I believe that this is why Farrell seldom gives us a sharply realized sense of place. Dreiser's less sophisticated and clumsy editorializing omniscience worked better.

However, Farrell can put these limitations of language and viewpoint to work to magnificent advantage. In The Face of Time he used the language of childhood and old age and the contrasting views of five-year-old Danny O'Neill seeing death overtake his grandfather and his grandfather seeing life waken in Danny to produce one of the finest elegiac novels of recent years. The same combination of language and viewpoint with the theme of decay makes "They Ain't the Men They Used To Be" in this collection quietly and profoundly moving. This story reminds us emphatically that James T. Farrell is still very much with us and in his blundering, awkward, honest way is doing admirable work.