[Farrell's] characters continually pat psychic pockets to assure themselves that their pasts are intact. Such characters rarely strip their personalities bare; they clothe them, instead, with steady if minute accretions of experience. Characterization is Farrell's principal strength as a novelist, and it derives from the poor man's existentialism to which he subscribes. With the possible exception of Eddie Ryan, who figures either centrally or peripherally in most volumes of the cycle, Farrell's people do not leap abysses in dramatic bursts of faith. Although they agonize over choices and despair of meaning, their universe is not absurd to them…. Their lives are almost entirely circumscribed by banality—"pitiless banality"—and stereotypical illusion, not because they are comfortable with such conditions but because it is too painful to live without them.

The humans in A Universe of Time assimilate experience slowly, usually by converting an event's significance to a cliche...