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A new selection of fiction and other writings by the late Harold Brodkey, one of the most powerful, polarizing, and original writers of the second half of the twentieth century.
With Harold Brodkey’s death in 1996, one of the most remarkable, controversial, and tragic careers in American literature came to an end. This selection of more than 20 pieces—drawn from the three collections and two novels Brodkey published during his lifetime, as well as his three posthumous collections—brings much-deserved new attention to one of the most celebrated, important, and rewarding authors of his era.
Over the decades, Brodkey’s work underwent a transformation unprecedented in American writing. Mentored by William Maxwell at The New Yorker, his well-manicured midcentury stories made him a rising star and drew comparisons to his contemporary John Updike. But in the ’60s and ’70s, he published an intermittent stream of very different work—shockingly original, intense, and explicit—that earned some of the most exalted praise directed at any writer of that period. Finally, in the late ’80s and ’90s, his work evolved further, in a monumental collection of previously published shorter fiction and novellas, and then a wildly ambitious—and vitriolically criticized—800-page novel. He seemed to create a new literary style for each decade, in a fascinating progression that readers can follow throughout these pieces.
While Brodkey’s focus on the interior experience of consciousness is directly inherited from modernists like Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, he is also perhaps the greatest unsung progenitor of today’s most acclaimed authors of autofiction, especially Karl Ove Knausgård and Elena Ferrante. Again and again, he excavates and recasts the central experiences of his life: his impoverished Jewish birth family; the death of his birth mother and abandonment by his birth father; his prosperous, troubled adoptive family; the intense attachments he formed as a young man with other young men; and his impassioned relationship with the beautiful, privileged woman who became his first wife.
Though he was both a figure of the literary establishment and a radical outsider, Brodkey always played for the highest artistic stakes. Now, his work demands revisiting, not least to help us see his achievement more clearly than his contemporaries could. As this collection shows, Brodkey’s work prefigures what have become central concerns of writing and culture today—sexuality, family, class, otherness, trauma, and identity—rendered in some of the most memorable, insightful, strange, and dynamic prose composed by any American writer of his century.
“So sensitive and wise that they truly deserve to be classics.” —Diane Cole, USA TODAY
“Like Wordsworth’s lyrics, his project is an epic act of imaginative remembering, gleams of half-extinguished thought sharpened into powerful literature. . . . His prose is passionate, mystical, full of long sentences capable of bearing even the most romantic music. He sounds like no one else. . . . Brodley’s work is difficult, not so much because it demands great learning as that it demands emotional and intellectual endurance.” —David Remnick, The Washington Post
“If this novel is of the same magnitude as some of its flaws—and I think it is—then it is indeed one of the big great books, with a style and spell all its own: very American—something huge with something hugely wrong with it—yet compellingly readable and full of lyrical, aphoristic felicities amid its apparent garrulity. It’s the ‘Moby Dick’ of what Freud called the family romance, the traumatic childhood battles against the kitchen-table colossi whose ghostly voices some writers spend half a career exorcising. . . . His achievement is monumental.” —Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune
“Brodkey is trying to say everything he possibly can summon about the exchange that obtains in a family; everything that can register on the mind and heart is in his text.” —Gordon Lish, The Washington Post
“I found his first stories brilliant. They were like no one else’s.” —William Maxwell, The Washington Post
“Brodkey’s syntax—idiosyncratic, monumental, an inimitable kind of music—conveyed many things simultaneously: that the phrase ‘dysfunctional family’ is pleonastic; that American colloquial speech can convey expansive thought; that a literature documenting the awful in everyday life can have the stately force of Greek tragedy; that truly personal writing necessitates throwing off the social constraint of ‘niceness,’ and speaking without permission. . . . Like his characters, Brodkey is most obsessed with exploring the moment in which intimacy happens, and our subsequent greed for or avoidance of it. . . . [He] continues to push against the boundary between sex and language.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
“Brodkey has been able to dispense with plot and to focus his marvelously exact and exacting attention on the play of feeling, consciousness and sensation – a great modernist project that he alone perhaps has the pertinacity and brilliance to pursue. . . . Brodkey, like Whitman, embraces contradictions. A typical sentence can be full of announcements, refinements, shifting definitions, shifting tense; a process of possible discovery, both exact and somehow blurred, a semi-drunken sense of the rush and shock of possibly mistaken but none the less vivid understanding. His search for truth can be finical, often professorial and clumsy, full of oblique dartings of the thought and baffled runs and eddies which command our fullest, almost clairvoyant attention.” —Alan Hollinghurst, The Washington Post
“There is something both handsome and dogged in Mr. Brodkey’s commitment to the idea that words are the writer’s great business, that there are words for everything, that silence is death, and that even silence has to be named.” —Michael Wood, The New York Times Book Review
“Harold Brodkey wrote really great, groundbreaking sentences. He was a genius of sentences. You get lost among the trees of his sentences when you venture into the forest of his novels, but in his stories their texture and cadences are mesmerizing. Reading his sentences was, for me, like hearing rock-and-roll when it started: liberating, exhilarating. Jeez, you can do that? I would say to myself as I read along. His style was improvisational, aural, brilliantly nuanced and modulated, jazzlike and deeply American, especially in its effect of confidentiality and candor. . . . The words were at once astoundingly subtle and totally natural, the feeling – of precarious love and joy, and of a child’s unalloyed sensory delight in the world, in the mere reflection of the sky in a puddle – profound. I understood then that because of the way Harold wrote, especially in his collections of stories, no one else in this country who wrote in a literary way – even those who disliked his work – could ever do so without being directly or indirectly influenced by him. . . . Brodkey is trying to say everything he possibly can summon about the exchange that obtains in a family; everything that can register on the mind and heart is in his text.” —Daniel Menaker, The New York Times Book Review
“Brodkey was one of the great originals of American literature, and in the last few decades he was surrounded by a cultish if ambiguous mystique. His luxuriously dilatory, stylistically dense, clearly autobiographical short stories and two novels were the target of extravagant praise and equally extravagant attacks. He was seen as an American Proust or one of the great pretenders, as a monstre sacré or simply a monster. The decision to reveal his suffering in public—some of this book first appeared in The New Yorker—required a willingness to go beyond image or reputation, to show himself at his most vulnerable. His doctor counseled against disclosure. Brodkey retorted that it is ‘therapeutic not to lie.’ The insistence on truth is what gives his memoir its somberly illuminating power. . . . There have been few accounts so precise of the processes and textures of intimate attachment. He is almost preternaturally attuned to those subtle, subliminal gestures that signal affection, wariness, mistrust or love.” —Eva Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review
“Readers of poetry will recognize in this last collection a self-consciousness—a continual, hesitant struggle to capture acts of noticing, remembering, speaking—that we have come to expect from the best poets.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“Brodkey makes the reader share his perception that people are only impersonating themselves. His stories have an infectious air, a kind of contagious paranoia. With all his dissecting asides, he forces an uncomfortable self-consciousness on the whole enterprise of reading.. . . [His] style is a magnificent achievement. . . . Brodkey captured the inner poetry of consciousness, the outer music of the spoken voice, the vanity of the modern writer, the infidelity of the imagination, the haunting persistence of the past, the painful loss of family through death or the killing insights that come with maturity. Most of all, he captured the child’s world spinning inside the adult mind." —Jonathan Rosen, The New York Times Book Review
“Brodkey didn’t revise to make his work finer, but to make it less false.” —Lee Smith, Bookforum Magazine
Introduction by Doug Seibold
THE STATE OF GRACE
FIRST LOVE AND OTHER SORROWS
THE QUARREL
SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
THE ABUNDANT DREAMER
HOFSTEDT AND JEAN—AND OTHERS
INNOCENCE
PLAY
A STORY IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE
HIS SON, IN HIS ARMS, IN LIGHT, ALOFT
PUBERTY
CEIL
S. L.
THE BOYS ON THEIR BIKES
THE LAST FOR NOW ABOUT NONIE from The Runaway Soul
PROFANE FRIENSHIP
EXCERPT From This Wild Darkness
THE BULLIES
WAKING
CAR BUYING
READING, THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
JANE AUSTEN VS. HENRY JAMES
NOTES ON AMERICAN FASCISM
FAMILY
FRANK AND HAROLD
FICTION IS FICTIONAL
THE GENTEELY OBSTINATE SHAWN
I THINK OF WHAT I WRITE