A taste for the realistic fiction of James T. Farrell is like a taste for sea food.

This reviewer, who happens to like the Farrell brand of realism, will concede that the author of Studs Lonigan has his blind spots, but there seems no reason to insist that any one imaginative writer encompass all of America in his work. The fact remains that Farrell has written of a particular section of American life as no other man has. His Chicago novels told a significant part of the American story, the part he knew best, and told it with honesty, meaning, and unforgettable creative power.

To a degree duplicated by few other writers, James T. Farrell's fiction over twenty years is all of a piece. Most of the items in this latest collection of his short stories fall with scarcely a ripple into the larger body of his work, the somber epic of Chicago's Irish Catholics. With the exception of three political parables, exhibiting Mr. Farrell's well known aversion to Stalinism, the majority of these twenty stories, sketches and monologues are fragments of the larger Danny O'Neill story.

Parenthetically, politics can blight Mr. Farrell's customary objective craftsmanship. Of the three anti-Communist items, only one, "Comrade Stanley," achieves the stature of a short story, with believable human beings under believable stress.

The prevailing theme of the stories in this book is failure, whether the leading character is an ex-professor of sociology, as in the title story, or a philosopher, a filling-station supervisor or a dead-arm pitcher in the Three Eye League. Farrell's ability to make his people real seems to operate in inverse ratio to their I. Q.'s. His New York intellectuals are too often lifeless, but his vacant-eyed Chicagoans have all the sharpness of old.

The young Irish-Americans of these stories are a few years younger than Studs Lonigan, mainly contemporaries of Danny O'Neill and graduates of Mary Our Mother High School. As of old, they wander on Indiana Avenue, go to parties with Lonigan's younger sister, lean against the drug-store front near the elevated station and watch young women passing by with "buttocks wriggling like a billboard display." Already, in the early Hoover era, they yearn for the "vanished splendor" of Studs Lonigan's heyday, and their failure, as always, is that they "fail even to become human beings."

Farrell is no uplifter, but he knows his people, and he can write of them gently. The best story in this volume is "Father Timothy Joyce," a glimpse into the secret heart of a young Chicago priest, told with insight, understanding and—believe it or not—sympathy.