Farrell's major fiction ("the story of America as I knew it") is funded so greatly by the struggles of his youth and maturity that we are in danger of reading the Bernard Carr trilogy as mere autobiography. (p. 52)

I want to suggest, however, that the trilogy is an act of, and meditation upon, the historiography of culture. The novels express—and dramatize—the problems besieging a writer who wishes to study the politics of social life. For both Farrell and Carr vivify a method of inquiry that portrays the experience of novelty, of historical emergents, as authentic expressions of change in human endeavor and nature. Breaking the backbone of a deterministic phenomenology, in this case the vulgarized Marxism of the 1930s, Farrell and his fictional alter ego wish accurately to study choice and individuality by rescuing them from an inexorable dialectic. Within this large theme, Farrell is concerned...