No End in Sight

THE ROAD BETWEEN (463 pp.)--James 7. Parrel I--Vanguard ($3.50).

In 1938, Critic Clifton Fadiman read Novelist James Farrell's No Star Is Lost and wrote (in The New Yorker): "If his editors will only strap him down tight, shoot him full of morphine, and, while he is helpless, perform some major operations not on him but on his prose, Mr. Farrell's effectiveness will increase, and so will the number of his readers." Either the publishers let Fadiman's prayer go unheeded or Farrell refused to submit to the operation. More than ten years and twelve books later, the Farrell prose is still a better cure for insomnia than almost anything else between covers. His new novel,

The Road Between, is possibly the dullest novel by a prominent U.S. writer in several decades.

Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy, for all its elephantine gait and structure and its lack of narrative sense, had the freshness of its tough Chicago South Side material, observed with accuracy and set down with passion. Since then, Farrell has been dishing up the same old Irish stew without so much as adding a fresh onion. The Road Between shuttles between Chicago and the leftish intellectual world of New York in 1932. Aspiring Writer Bernard Carr, who works for an undertaker, has eloped with his employer's daughter and settled down in Manhattan to write. The Road is a wearisome recital of Bernard's troubles with publishers, poverty, his wife's unwelcome pregnancy and the everlasting pressure from Communist pals to make Bernard give up his creative independence and write party-line tracts. Farrell's handling of this overworked material is inept to the point of being ludicrous. Since Author Farrell seldom settles for less than a trilogy, Bernard Carr is almost bound to show up at least once more (The Road Between is a sequel to Bernard Clare--TIME, May 20, 1946). Perhaps it is still not too late to take Critic Fadiman's advice.

*Farrell switched from Clare to Carr, after a reader named Bernard Clare brought suit for libel.

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