When abstract and self- consciously intelligent it is ponderous, pretentious: A moronic boy sits in a kitchen chair with a doll and near him a sad woman is peeling potatoes over a wash tub. A single tractor moves at the far end of a dipping and swelling field. Then you come to another sunny district - puritanical little gardens, garden beds, dry-looking rural lawns, clean ditches alongside the road, and fewer trees, and those are topped or pruned or solitary in wide spaces.
When straightforward and descriptive it is effective:
The weakest element in the novel is the unevenness of its prose. The Proustian conviction that linear narratives are inauthentic tools for capturing life makes for confusing juxtapositions, but sometimes powerful ones. The details of ordinary Midwestern life are incessantly conveyed, as if the miniaturist preoccupations of Nicholson Baker have been put in larger hands. The dissection of sexual development and emergence of bisexuality shock less than they would have at the time of the book's commissioning, but may be more interesting for that. Only Salman Rushdie stood out prominently as a Brodkey defender, pointing out the many richnesses of the author's prose, accepting its many longueurs (The Runaway Soul is over 800 pages long), while defending its "huge carnival of language".Ĭertainly the strength and themes of Brodkey's stories recur in the longer work. Little of it had much to do with the merits of the book, for encumbered with such expectations the authors of the Gospels themselves would have suffered at the hands of reviewers. Inevitably, when The Runaway Soul appeared, there was an almost universal sense of let-down. It was, in the final analysis, as if America wanted a non-existent masterpiece, and one created by a writer (unlike J.D. But neither explanation fully accounts for the fame this non-performance grew into. Also, as a New Yorker contributor living in the city, socially (and sexually) active, a powerful personality who was tall and attractive to boot, Brodkey was the natural object of the gossip and talk that make up much of a putative literary reputation. True, Brodkey was already recognised as a talented writer of stories whose natural next move, in conventional American literary terms, would be the "big book" or novel. But it was the novel which literary society was waiting for nothing else would do. "Innocence", an account of a sexually voracious affair with a beautiful young woman ("To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die"), stands out for its candour, and the title story, about the death of his adopted mother, is made the more moving by the dispassion of the narrator's account. His collection Stories in an Almost Classical Mode appeared in 1988, many of them very good indeed. The Runaway Soul, Brodkey's novel, appeared in 1991, but it was during the quarter-century of its intermittent composition that Brodkey became truly famous.
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