Book dossier

No star is lost

by James T. Farrell

No Star Is Lost begins in 1914, when the O'Neills are penniless again, when the family has grown to include two daughters and five sons, and when young Danny O'Neill is living with the grandmother in the comparative luxury of an apartment. The new light it throws on the environment is in its picture of the poverty of the O'Neills, with their excitement on payday, when they know they will get meat for supper, and their painful struggle to keep up some outward respectability in a world where they cannot pay their bills or get credit. And although the characters fight, insult each other, get drunk, beat the children, curse the Jews and the neighbors, they also make desperate efforts to get along better, to be patient and keep sober, so that their explosions seem pathetic rather than vicious. -- Time Magazine.