James Baquet

    “Studs Lonigan” has been both a forgettable 1960 film and a slightly better 1979 TV miniseries. Both were based on James T. Farrell’s gritty tale of a young Irish-American tough growing up on Chicago’s South Side during the Great Depression. The work earned the 29th slot on the Modern Library’s list of the “100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. It was not actually one novel, but a trilogy.

    The first was published in 1932, and titled “Young Lonigan.” It followed the boy William “Studs” Lonigan through his 14th year. Bright enough, and seeming to have a good future — his father running a successful painting business, allowing him to send Studs to a prestigious private Catholic school — his dreams differ from those of his parents for him. His dad wants him to be a football star, his mom wants him to be a priest.

    What does Studs want? He wants to be a tough guy, a big man on campus, who can woo all the girls and beat up all the boys.

    But he fails in both endeavors. He mishandles his relationship with the girl he admires most, and is a mediocre fighter at best. But one day he wins a fight against “Weary” Reilly (played by Jack Nicholson in the 1960 film) and what was basically a sloppy fight between two boys takes on for Studs the dimensions of an epic battle, and he turns to it again and again in later years when things aren’t going so well. The first novel ends with Studs building on his “victory” and hanging out with street thugs instead of going to school. The die is cast.

    In the 1934 “Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan” he tries to join the army to fight in World War I (it’s 1917) but he is rebuffed as too young (just 15). It smarts. He keeps leaning on his reputation as the guy who beat Weary Reilly, but near the end of the book — drunk, and out of shape — he is beaten by Reilly at a party.

    Book three (“Judgment Day,” 1935) sees Lonigan a broken man, an alcoholic with a venereal disease in a bad relationship. He dies of pneumonia at just 30, leaving behind what author Farrell called the “spiritual poverty” of his environment, as well as the physical poverty of the Depression.

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. deals with badly

    2. showing reality in an unpleasant way

    3. sexually transmitted

    4. hurts

    5. bad guys

    6. highly respected

    7. rejected

    8. date, try to win romantically

    9. not very good

    10. things cannot be changed