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THE FACE OF TIME (366 pp.)--James T. Farrell--Vanguard ($3.75).

James T. Farrell has spent most of his writing life in the shadow of a Chicago poolroom hoodlum named Studs Lonigan. But while Farrell undoubtedly put his best talent into the creation of Studs, he has since lavished double the affection, energy and space (present count: 5 vols., 2,529 pp.) on Danny O'Neill, a sensitive, spectacled youngster growing up in the same South Side slums as Studs and James Farrell himself. Earlier novels in the O'Neill saga, e.g., A World I Never Made, My Days of Anger, found young Danny seething with frustrations and a rage to leave the poor, brawl-bitten shanty Irish world of the O'Neills who bore him and the O'Flahertys who brought him up. In The Face of Time, Danny is five, too young to care about much except where the next ice cream cone is coming from.

The time is easygoing 1909, but even Danny senses that the going is hard for his folks. Grandfather Tom O'Flaherty is in his 70s and can hold his own only at the local booze parlor. Grandmother Mary is a termagant who keeps "givin' him hell . . . because that's the way you have to treat a man." Aunt Margaret is in love with a man who is not only married but a "black Protestant devil" besides, and pretty Aunt Louise is dying of TB. As for Uncle Al, a shoe salesman who foots most of the bills, he talks like Babbitt and acts like Mussolini.

On rare visits to his mother, Danny is treated to more grim realism and the reader to Author Farrell's small-fry prose: "Danny didn't like it, seeing his new baby brother being fed at Mama's breasts . . . When he was a little baby he did that, got milk from Mania's breast. It almost made him mad. Why did God make it that way? It was like oysters. Oysters looked like milk that would make you maybe sick if you ate them. He couldn't look at oysters."

At novel's end, Danny has to look at Grandfather Tom dying horribly of cancer, but there is perhaps one sadder fact about The Face of Time: how still it stands for James T. Farrell.

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