FATHER AND SON by James T. Farrell is the third volume in the "Danny O'Neill" series of 5 volumes, following A WORLD I NEVER MADE and NO STAR IS LOST.  Most critics have suggested that the author had intended the O'Neill series to balance out Farrell's better-known STUDS LONIGAN trilogy, in which Danny O'Neill is a minor character.  While STUDS LONIGAN also portrays the struggles of the working class American-Irish families in Chicago in the early 1900s, and the constant attraction of criminal activities to which Studs Lonigan is regularly drawn, the "Danny O'Neill" series was intended to provide a contrast against the hopelessness into which Studs had fallen -- that Danny O'Neill could utilize his intellect to fight against the poverty which surrounded him, and rise above his surroundings to escape the "world I never made."  This third volume begins in 1918, during the last months of World War I, and concludes in 1923, and covers the years in which Danny O'Neill is a high school student in a parochial school in Chicago.  These are years when Danny O'Neill is beginning to mature into manhood, and he rashly strikes out in all the directions in which he has been led to understand are the "proper" measures of being a man.  Unfortunately, his models have either been from popular culture, or from the poor Irish environment to which he has been exposed throughout his life -- particularly from his father, an illiterate and hard-drinking working man, who has only recently been promoted to an only slightly higher position at a despatch company.  And, while Danny is measuring himself against his father, his father is also measuring himself against his own son -- and finding his son wanting.  Both father and son find themselves embarrassed and angry with each other -- and with themselves.  Farrell confronts the reader with the stark poverty to which young Danny was daily exposed, as well as the constant conflicts of simple survival to which the poor are regularly confronted, whether in the early 1920s, or well into the 21st century.  It is not simply an expose' of urban poverty at the turn of the 20th century, but a tribute as well to the hard-bitten love which kept to many families together, no matter what the odds against them, and the generations-old conflicts and dreams between all fathers and sons. Readers may find it comparable to LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL by THOMAS WOLFE.

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