Real People Are Dull

WHAT TIME COLLECTS by James T. Farrell. 421 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

"And, with pitiless banality, time passed." So writes James T. Farrell on page 399 of his 18th novel, accurately describing the way time has passed for his characters, and for the reader, in the preceding 398 pages. Banality is what Farrell's novel is about, and it is also the novel's sole literary device. The people of the book are joyless, hateless, empty of good or evil, fleshy machines that transmit at the audible level the prattle of Babbittry and, octaves above, the silent scream of tedium. The prose in which they are described is also joyless and hateless, empty of merit and of error, painfully boring. And it is obvious that this is intentional. Farrell's setting is St. Louis in the 1920s, and his method is to make his readers suffer at the same pace as his characters.

The Submen. In this willfully limited goal he is successful. The novel's desultory action occupies about two years, and reading about it provides the horrifying illusion of having spent that long with Farrell's submen. The reader's reaction is likely to be exasperation.

The central figures are Anne Duncan, a waitress and technically a virgin, and Zeke Daniels, the braggartly buffoon who marries her. There are assorted relatives: Anne has a weak, churchly mother, Zeke a managing mother and a popinjay father who struts in Klan robes. They are presented in a protracted series of flashbacks leading from the marriage of Anne and Zeke. The flashbacks do not resolve down to a nub of meaning but are centrifugal, leading away from meaning into the thinning reaches of an infinity of pointlessness. Conversations take place but nothing is said. Eventually the book stops, Farrell having shown to his own satisfaction, not how Anne and Zeke got that way, but "this is how it was."

No Diversion. To show how things are, with nothing subtracted for propriety or added for spice, is the sole aim of naturalism, the earnest flat-footed literary school of which Farrell has been perhaps the most determinedly flat-footed U.S. member. His career, beginning with his wildly successful Studs Lonigan trilogy, has been ruled by the naturalistic writers' obsessive need to prove, over and over again, that life is not art. It is a lesson that occasionally needs teaching, and Farrell and such hesitant early experimenters as William Dean Howells cleared away a good deal of literary rubbish by writing the way they did. But merely taking the farthest possible position from romanticism is not a way to arrive at a philosophy of writing. Each of these polar views is too limiting. In a romantic novel, the hero always wins when he rolls the dice; in a Farrell novel, he always craps out.

Farrell says insistently that most people are dreary, not fascinating, and the reader imagines Farrell saying "I'm not going to divert you from the important truth of dullness by presenting my dull people in an entertaining way. I'm going to be as dull as possible about it."

So Farrell has been saying for 40 years. No one pays much attention any more, but there is courage in his wrongheadedness, and obviously he's going to go on saying it.

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