[In the following review, Tóibín offers a mixed assessment of This Wild Darkness.]

Harold Brodkey died of AIDS in January 1996; Oscar Moore died in September 1996. Brodkey wrote about his illness for the New Yorker; Moore for the Guardian. Obviously, when they wrote their articles neither of them knew when they would die, but since each article is dated, it is now possible for the reader of these two books to know how long they have left, and there is a stark, urgent edge to their accounts of what it is like to live with AIDS. They mean what they are saying, and while there is a certain comfort in the fact that both of them are so brave in the face of illness and death, and so determined to carry on writing, the idea that they are dead now makes these books sad and frightening when you put them down, but intriguing and fascinating as you join the authors in letting details and memories and wry observations draw your attention away from what must inevitably come.

[In This Wild Darkness], Brodkey's voice is grave and grandiose, as befits the author of The Runaway Soul. His vanity about his work and his looks (‘Do you know the myth of my irresistibility?’) is on an Old Testament scale. He is capable of the most extraordinary sentences. His parents and grandparents were ‘insanely brave’, he says. ‘They, each of them, had a strong tropism towards the epic.’

He tries not to be frightened by the news that he has AIDS, and the book becomes a battle between his effort to resist fear and his ability to do everything with death (‘Death itself is soft, softly lit, vastly dark’) except face it. There is a terrible sadness to his tone, a sense that he, of all people, is being slowly defeated and crushed. He has double-glazing and wall-to-wall industrial carpeting in his apartment in Manhattan to keep the noise out, but now, in hospital, ‘there was a woman in an adjacent room who insisted on screaming at the top of her lungs. She was told that this was very disturbing to the people around her … and she screamed that she didn't care. “I want to upset everyone,” she paused to reply when the nurses tried to reason with her.’

The heroine of this book, acting in the same way almost as the natural world in Mark Doty's book, is Brodkey's wife, Ellen Schwamm. ‘She insists that she regrets nothing. This is her discipline and self-assertion when, openly or not, one is in her charge.’ And: ‘I lived through Ellen's will from time to time during those days. I had her agility and her subtlety vicariousliy. I had that merciful depth of her female self at my disposal … Our regular lives, our once-usual life together, had been reproduced in a truncated form in a hospital room.’

One of the saddest moments is when Abner, Brodkey's four-year-old grandson, arrives to visit. He ‘came over and took my hand and generally didn't leave my side. But the horror was I had no strength to respond or pretend after only a short while, less than an hour. I am not able to be present for him and never will be anymore.’ In a way, the drama of this book comes from Brodkey learning, after all those years of tropisms towards the epic, to write as plainly as that.

After the diagnosis the doctor tells him he can have a few good years, and he manages two years without any opportunistic infections. ‘As a prize, as goal,’ he writes, ‘it is not very American … The American daydream, as in Twain (and Hemingway), is about rebuilding after the flood, about being better off than before, about outwitting this or that challenge, up to and including death. Well, how do you manage to be optimistic for the moment? Without hope?’ Like Doty, he is prepared to believe that nature is almost alert, in league with him. In the country he looks at the autumn leaves: ‘they and I are dying together,’ he writes. ‘Much of the time I do nothing. I lie in bed or on the porch. I stare at death, and death stares at me.’

He travels to Venice (‘I am dying … Venice is dying … the century is dying’), he muses about writing, he goes back over his childhood and his sexual history. He still has a tendency to write as though he is God the Father. He remembers two men who lived with him years before, Charlie and Douglas. ‘I would fuck them occasionally, usually one by one,’ he writes. One wonders what happened when he didn't fuck them one by one; in fact, one wonders if Brodkey, God rest him, did not, as his prose style often suggests, have two penises. But towards the close of the book there are fewer and fewer grandiloquent remarks. He writes in one of the last pages that he has been ‘in bed, in the foetal position, for two weeks’, and that is not the way things should have ended for him. His last entry is dated Late Fall, 1995.