"Work, senseless dates, fears, terrors, with near breakdowns every six months," Farrell describes the dream-girl of his title story, "she would go to bed and there lie in terror of something unreal and unseen, and she would get up at all hours and take taxicabs just to be with anyone who would lie with her and hold her . . . tell her she was a good girl and that she wasn't alone. This was her life."

Nor, as his readers are long aware, is there a great deal more than this to the lives of Farrell's other dream-boys and dream-girls. Under his compassionless prose and belabored cataloging we feel in every story the same dissatisfaction and the same dull dream—a sense of unfulfilled human possibilities sometimes strong enough to make his people come true.

In "Slouch," "Yellow Streak," and "A Romantic Interlude in the Life of Willie Collins" he reports three commonplace failures so tangibly that we share a common disappointment. And in "A Misunderstanding," the story of a man who puts up just so long with a wife who can't answer a straight question, there is both tragedy and humor, the latter an element heretofore alien to this writer. In "Have I Got Sun in My Eyes?", an account of a whistle-stop wolf's bewilderment at the hands of New York women bewildered by Freud, he brings off a bit of Ring Lardner business rather handily.

The remaining pieces are hewn by and large out of that same old Fifty-seventh Street woodpile with that same old axe. "Digging Our Own Graves" isn't nearly as grim as it tries to be and has a distinct second-hand ring. He telegraphs his punch right off and then delays it endlessly in "The Fastest Runner on Sixty-first Street." And "The Martyr" and the stories about Paris take much too long for saying so very little.

Indeed, when he writes in the piece called "Summer Tryout" of a play in which "sons speak to their mother as if she were a girl they were trying to pick up on a street corner," he speaks fairly accurately of his own sense of dialogue. "Written in the naturalistic manner," he assures us, "but without any real feeling or insight, the play seemed to embody just about every trick of corny melodrama."

For there is a slovenliness in Farrell's use of words and a tastelessness about his prose that rob these stories of color and forward movement. If he wrote them in longhand it would be with the old-fashioned Palmer Method backhand-slant.

Yet what is really lacking here is more than forward movement and more than color. What is really wrong is his tacit premise that a work of art requires no more of the artist than the laying of a case study on the table with the flat declaration that every word in it is God's Truth.

God's Truth is sufficient for the sociologist and usually more than enough for the reporter nowadays; but the artist, if he is one, must come up with his own truth: the truth of his own emotional involvement. But Farrell assumes that a direct line between subject and reader evades the whole creative process. The only emotion of his own he can spare to his material is a thinnish sort of sentimentality touched by a vague nostalgia; in the 1890 valentine called "A Coincidence" and in "The Wake of Patsy McLaughlin" the pages begin sticking together. Which leaves the reader feeling that most of these stories have never been completed—neither on the typewriter nor in the heart.