The Runaway Soul (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

At 835 pages, THE RUNAWAY SOUL might seem superficially to be a runaway novel, an massive effort to chronicle the troubled life of its protagonist, Wiley Silenowicz, adopted in the early days of the Great Depression, when his mother dies and his father cannot care for him. Wiley ends up with a couple whose wife thinks that adding this child to the family might stabilize her teetering marriage.

The Silenowiczes, S.L. and Lila, already known to readers of Brodkey’s short stories, live in the Midwest, near St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, River, where Brodkey himself grew up, and adopted child. The Silenowicz’s daughter Nonie, some years older than Wiley (whose name suggests his slyness), is not the ideal sister. It is thought that she may have dispatched two pre-Wiley siblings by suffocating them, although one cannot be 100 percent sure.

This book is really an anatomy of what it is to grow up adopted, especially when both of the adoptive parents die early—S.L. just as Wiley reaches puberty and Lila a few years later. Wiley, whose sexual identity has been confused by incestuous encounters with both his stepfather and his stepsister and whose insecurity has been intensified by his real father’s taking him from the Silenowiczes when the boy is six only to return him after a few days, goes through life frantically trying to find love.

In this novel, Brodkey deals simultaneously and in minute detail with several levels of the protagonist’s conscious and subconscious mind. If the book is sometimes slow-moving and tedious, so is life. Brodkey seeks to write accurately about life, not always being as selective as he might have been in his literary reproduction of it.

Sources for Further Study

Chicago Tribune. November 10, 1991, XIV, p. 3.

The Christian Science Monitor. December 18, 1991, p. 13.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. November 10, 1991, p. 4.

New Statesman and Society. IV, November 29, 1991, p. 40.

The New York Review of Books. XXXVIII, November 21, 1991, p. 3.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVI, November 10, 1991, p. 3.

Newsweek. CXVIII, November 18, 1991, p. 81.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVIII, August 30, 1991, p. 68.

The Wall Street Journal. December 5, 1991, p. A12.

The Washington Post Book World. XXI, November 10, 1991, p. 1.