Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Most of these stories, originally published between 1963 and 1988, though sometimes in significantly different form, will be familiar to readers who have followed Brodkey’s strange career. (About half of the stories first appeared in THE NEW YORKER, and several have been chosen for annual anthologies of outstanding stories.) Still, it is difficult to judge a writer’s work when it is scattered in periodicals. STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE will allow readers to make their own judgment: Is Brodkey, as his partisans declare, a genuinely major writer, or is he, as some skeptics have suggested, merely a creature of hype?

The truth, it may be, lies somewhere in between. The eighteen stories collected here, presented in the order in which they were written, are animated by a powerful intelligence and a distinctive style. Brodkey’s forte is the probing analysis of personal interaction, a kind of running commentary registering every nuance of motive and action. “She is speaking -- in a chatty, sort of pushily intelligent voice: she is playacting intelligence.” That is from a story called “Largely an Oral History of My Mother": Brodkey examines himself and others with merciless detachment and with a fineness of discrimination that sometimes becomes fussily obsessive (“largely” an oral history; stories “almost” in a classical mode: everything qualified to the point of pretension).

Brodkey’s greatest weakness is his excessive preoccupation with power. Family life (the area for many of these stories), social intercourse, sexual experience--wherever he turns, Brodkey sees a primal struggle for power. Not infrequently, this relentless emphasis becomes suffocating; the reader puts the book down for some fresh air. For all that, STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE is a book that no one who cares about contemporary fiction will want to miss.

Sources for Further Study

Boston Globe. October 9, 1988, p. 91.

Chicago Tribune. September 25, 1988, XIV, p. 5.

Kirkus Reviews. LVI, August 1, 1988, p. 1077.

Library Journal. CXIII, October 1, 1988, p. 100.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. September 25, 1988, p. 3.

The Nation. CCXLVII, October 17, 1988, p. 348.

The New Republic. CXCIX, October 24, 1988, p. 30.

New York. XXI, September 19, 1988, p. 54.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, September 18, 1988, p. 3.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIV, July 29, 1988, p. 221.

Time. CXXXII, October 17, 1988, p. 81.

The Washington Post Book World. XVIII, September 18, 1988, p. 5.