[In the following assessment of Farrell's first collection, Kronenberger praises the harsh realism of Farrell's characterization.]

Mr. Farrell, in treating people of one milieu, does not make the mistake of reducing them to a uniform characterization. They react to their common background in different ways, and their conflicts are as much against one another as against other kinds of people or life itself. For the most part they are ignorant, parochial, unimaginative; some are dislocated by poverty, almost all are cramped by small horizons. They are not innately hard people, but they lack understanding almost as often as they lack sensibility; and their lives, materialistic but not mercenary, touched but not changed by the church, colored but not deepened by sex, are usually crude and sometimes sordid. Products of a uniform culture, their personalities differ and their fates vary.

It is in making plain these people's culture that Mr. Farrell shows his knowledge of his material; but in following out their fates he sometimes rises to a more significant plane of writing and proves himself a brooding realist. Three stories in this book are much alike in pattern and effect, and by contrast with Farrell's merely photographic pieces they bring us up against the harsh insolubility of existence. In each of these three stories—"The Scarecrow," "Twenty-Five Bucks," and "Well, That's That"—a sordid, down-at-heel figure is thrust expiring upon society, a society very little superior, and is passed up or put out of the picture with vacant, uncomprehending cynicism. There is a very ungenteel irony in these tales in which two whores and a ham prize-fighter who lack dignity get pummeled by people who lack decency. If ever there were people who knew not what they did, they are in these pictures of a society that is sordid because it is ignorant and usually ignorant because it is poor. It is a society you don't want to see existing, and its cast-offs are too tragic to be merely pitied.

But it is a society you need to see existing, and Mr. Farrell puts it very plainly on view. Perhaps there is more of kindliness in it than he has shown, but if he has left something out, he has not disfigured the picture, he has only the more emphasized its salient traits. Here is a proletariat almost totally unaware of the claims being made for it by intellectuals and the aims being set for it by revolutionaries; but whatever your attitude toward those claims and aims, you want passionately to see these people brought out of their intellectual stupor and moral numbness into the light.