My Days of Anger

Best known for his wonderfully searing portrait of Irish American life in his Studs Lonigan Trilogy this work is a novel featuring the more self aware Danny O'Neill. Once read there is no way one forgets these works by Farrell, one of the USA's best writers so far. Danny is supporting himself by working in a gas station and endures many of the traumas associated with youth and penury. The failure of American society to meet the needs of so many Americans are laid out. You will find insights, and some guilts in a mesmerizing experience. There are four more novels in this series, if you have the nerve.

This is the last book in the timeline of Danny O'Neill's story, although The Face of Time was written after it. This novel cycle, along with the companion Studs Lonigan trilogy, made me think about the idea that it's amazing as many of us survive being young as do. If I ever go back and do my masters in English, I may do the thesis on the bildungsroman as survival narrative, using the Washington Park novels, along with John Powers' Mount Greenwood trilogy and Henry Roth's Call it Sleep, as source material.