[In the following mixed review, Cahill asserts that This Wild Darkness “is less difficult than Brodkey's other works, and though it is not his best book it is his most approachable.”]

We won't have Harold Brodkey to kick around anymore. This he makes clear in his first posthumous book, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, a series of brilliant, inane, self-absorbed, self-reflective essays and ramblings first published in The New Yorker as he died from complications due to AIDS. Included in the jumble are assorted theories, ranging from love (“My measure of it is that I should have died to spare her”) to the Midwestern origins of the yellow brick road.

During their serial appearances, these writings, now shorn of their more corrosively personal bits of gossip and opinion, had the fascination of a spectacle: an infamous if not famous writer, his reputation a matter of ongoing dispute in the New York literary world, dying shamelessly in public, determined to tell the truth about his enemies and even, perhaps, about himself. In the present volume, this particular effect is somewhat dispersed, and though the haphazard nature of much of these musings is emphasized by the finality of their appearance in book form, the material seems in general more rich and permanent than it originally did. Brodkey's scattershot account remains compelling even in, and often by way of, its many oblique moments.

Brodkey was a champion egoist, and there is plenty in this book that will maintain his reputation as such. “Do you know the myth of my irresistibility?” he writes; or, “I am enormously conceited about my writing. Everyone is more interested in my death.” This egotism might be said to carry over into the very death whose course he is tracing. We are led to believe that Brodkey acquired the deadly virus sometime before 1977, during a homosexual period that fell between his two marriages.

The relevant question is whether or not there are grounds to believe that Brodkey is a writer of sufficient achievement to justify his pride or at least to excuse some of his silly reflections. Though his work has been praised to the highest degree by such major critics as Denis Donoghue and Frank Kermode, and though he had, and still has, what is strangely known as a “cult following,” Brodkey has not, one senses, been widely read or deeply absorbed by the present literary culture. His huge novel A Party of Animals was so long a much-discussed work-in-progress that its eventual appearance, less felicitously retitled The Runaway Soul, seemed almost impertinent, if not wholly unnecessary.

Through a fierce combination of will and talent, Brodkey made himself into a name to be reckoned with, someone who might well be a genius—“the “American Proust,” as he was fond of suggesting—and who could thus be discounted only at risk. As every litterateur knows, there are once-prominent critics and editors who remain known today only as “the fool who turned down Lolita” or “the ass who thought Ulysses was a hoax.” Brodkey was a master at evoking this apprehension among the chattering class and at deploying it to keep a mystery of his reputation well wrapped in its enigma. This helps explain his consistent appearances in The New Yorker under the markedly different editorial reigns of William Shawn and Tina Brown.

So what is Brodkey's writing like? Well, for one thing, it is not much like Proust's, the most frequently adduced comparison. Though there is an obvious resemblance between the two writers—their shared obsessive excavation of memory—there is nothing in Brodkey's work in any way similar to the detailed social portraiture so central to Proust's great novel. There are few characters in Brodkey's works other than the man himself. Stylistically and philosophically he is closer to Henry James and William Faulkner, two writers not often thought of together, but who, like Brodkey, were willing to suffer awkwardness and obscurity, searching out what Harold Bloom has evocatively called “the difficult pleasures.”

This Wild Darkness is less difficult than Brodkey's other works, and though it is not his best book it is his most approachable. It is the ideal place for an unfamiliar reader to begin trying to see what pleasures he can provide. Those pleasures, and they are many and substantial, derive from the unflinching quality of Brodkey's relentlessly inward gaze. As he writes toward the conclusion of his book, “One may be tired of the world—tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality—while reality itself remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely real, without miracle—or instruction.” Brodkey has, throughout his career, been willing to extend himself into dangerous territory, areas of spiritual and personal reflection and confession, where it is easy to appear pompous or naive.