A Kirkus Review of James T. Farrell's late novel " Sam Holman " expressing his disillusionment with what passed for post-war " Trotskyism " [ I still think it is an important and politically instructive novel ]

SAM HOLMAN by James T. Farrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 1983 [In this posthumous footnote to Farrell's many novels about 1930s politics and his alter-ego Eddie Ryan (The Silence of History, The Death of Nora Ryan, etc.), Eddie writes the life-story of his old acquaintance from Trotskyite days--Jewish intellectual Sam Holman; and, as usual in Farrell's weakest fiction, the flat, uninvolving narrative alternates between political talk and sexual encounters. Columbia '25, Sam gets a job writing and editing for the Social Sciences Encyclopedia; he has a series of affairs, then marries Frances Dunsky (a reader at a publishing company) and also becomes associate editor of The Modern Torah, founded by Zionist friend Oliver Hirsch (who'll go on to found a Commentary-like magazine). But Sam is no Zionist, and while his marriage crumbles his major interest becomes revoutionary politics: he joins the Communist Party, becomes disillusioned by its demagoguery and slimy tactics (""The Party needed to become a real American Party"")', he's attracted to the example of Trotsky in exile (""There was less hampering of the mind when one thought within the perspectives of Trotsky and Trotskyism than when one though within the perspectives of Stalin and Stalinism""); the rise of Nazism increases his sense of Jewish identity; he becomes disillusioned with the Trotskyites (""They were better than the Stalinists and their party was better in its internal structure as well as in the makeup of its members, but could they serve as the model of the new and better society?""); and he winds up with the Socialists circa 1935--while a 1960s epilogue shows Sam, just before his death at 61, as something of a Zionist and a senior editor for Enterprise, ""the most prestigious magazine about business in the country."" A few buffs of 1930s revolutionary politics may want to pick out the roman à clef identities here--though that scene is captured far better in dozens of other books (including Irving Howe's recent memoir). Otherwise: lifeless chronicling, a disappointment even by late-Farrell standards--with numbingly colorless prose and yards of uninspired dialogue.]