[In the following review, Bromwich offers a stylistic analysis of The Runaway Soul.]

The words “narcissist” and “solipsist” are sometimes used interchangeably, but they have very different meanings. A narcissist sees himself in everything. A solipsist sees everything in himself. The narcissist has a chance of becoming a great artist, in genres related to the monologue. The solpsist is more likely to act with some human decency, notwithstanding a certain blindness to the reality of other people. Harold Brodkey frankly presents himself as a narcissist and a solipsist at once; it could even be said that the makes recognition of the fact a part of his metier. He talks a good deal, in writing, about being his kind of writer; about living the life he has to live in order to publish his life. So placed, and appearing with a first novel, he has sought to give a new sense to the publisher's standby “long awaited.” This book has waited until the author is in his 60s, and its length makes a barely expedient compromise with interminability. That it should have come out a mere 800 pages may seem, to the appetite of the monologuist, hardly better than its not coming out at all, but a compromise had to be struck somewhere.

Brodkey must have felt that the book was needed to correct an anomaly of his reputation. He has been known as an intense consciousness, rather than a tale-teller, historian of manners, satirist, or “sensibility in prose”—writerly roles that he scorns or gladly failes to satisfy. The reputation grows out of his short stories; but there was a question how the stories added up. First Love and Other Sorrows (1958) was the work of a young man writing with careful poignance in The New Yorker idiom of the '50s. Twenty-seven years later, a bigger and much more generous collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, broke new ground entirely. These stories had no separable subjects, for their concern was the workings of a single mind upon its experience. The stories themselves were an experience, with prose either speculative or notational, but capable of the most exacting shifts of weight. Buried among the rhapsodic lusers of “Innocence” and “Angel,” or the sheer anecdotage of “Largely an Oral History of My Mother,” were the broad lines of an autobiography. The novel is not quarried from these sources, precisely, but they first mapped out its terrain.

The Runaway Soul is an attempt to give the autobiography whole. It divides roughly into two parts, sex and family; and if one says that it comes to terms with sex and not with family, that is only part of the story. A fruitless effort of self-comprehension in the latter realm comes to seem a motive of the hero's absorbing indulgence in the former, so that the two aspects of the life are successfully made to throw shadows on each other.

Two aspects—just two? The ordinary pursuits of status, power, money, all the ideal or material objects of a personal culture: these things hardly matter to Brodkey's characters, and the omission is interesting. Mostly it is liberating. His characters are passengers in their bodies. They are not, for the most part, pleasant, but they have souls, and all are in some way questers: the furthest thing from consumers, calculators, social creatures. If they stumbled into Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, they would be arrested and given jobs, clothes, and proper descriptions.

The theorist of the novel Rene Girard has a term for the exploits of the kind of character that Brodkey leaves out, the kind that after all forms the bulk of the personae of fiction generally. They act, Girard says, from “mediated desire.” A character A, thinks or feels something about B because of C; his motives are inseparable from his knowledge that C, too, is feeling something about B; and this is tied up with A's feeling something about C as well. This web of relations vanishes in Brodkey. For him, there are only A and B in any given scene (whether solemn or trivial, at twenty pages or 200) and in any containable tract of experience. What A thinks of B is connected not with any imaginable C, but rather with what A thinks of A. Brodkey speaks, in a revealing phrase, of “the absurd adventure of paying attention to what one thinks, that means having a career, that means being a grown-up in a scale of would-be masterful agency and urgency.” One notices the casual disdain of “absurd” and “would-be.” Worldliness, maturity, with all their daily pressure and weight, have no claim on his characters, who allude to these estimable qualities but know them to be unreal.

The Runaway Soul has a first-person voice—first person without limit, in a way that the narrator-hero suggests with a single phrase about himself: “contentiously male.” This is said with some price, and one understands the pride a little. One also understands the post-adolescent girl lying underneath the hero, who somewhere in his incessant groping and talking, says to him finally: “I WANT YOU TO SHUT UP FOR A WHILE AND I WANT YOU TO DO IT NOW.” She speaks for the reader, and the author seems to know it. There is nothing complacent about these self-reflections. The book is someone's argument with himself—a wrangle of unharmonizing perceptions. He can make an early self-portrait out of a few geographical and physiognomic facts, and then say uncozeningly: “If I loved you, this is the creature who would love you.” There is distance in those words, as there is in: “Part of what I look like is that I am the person who has had my life.” At the point where narcissism can turn into a compulsive desire to charm, something goes cold in this author. Few readers will love him. Still, it is, with him, a point of artistic honor not to strive to be lovable.

Wiley Silenowicz is the name of the hero. His important relations are with his adoptive mother, Lila; her husband, S.L.; and above all with their daughter, Nonie. It takes an effort to recall that these are surrogate parents, that much of the book happens in St. Louis, one long episode in New York, and so on. Also, that the hero has a dead father about whom nothign is said but much may be thought. Of S.L.'s not being his real father, he says early on that “the grief is like a barely moving but very strong wind.” That wind is everywhere in the book; but the landscape it passes through is entirely of the mind. Wiley's virtual parents S.L. and Lila appear as voices of garrulous wisdom—Lila the more dialectical, S.L. the more rebarbative of the two. S.L. nicknames Wiley “pisherkins” and covers him with jokes, complaints, bribes of affection. Lila says: “Remeber Eve in the Bible? Well, I'm Madame Trouble myself in my own little way.” Between them, in the father especially, one can see the sources of Brodkey's elaborate prose: “He said things over and over, but he said them differently each time.”

By contrast with all these, his stepsister is an opaque character, and yet Nonie is the most important fact of Wiley's life. She is believed by Lila to have murdered two infant siblings some years apart, and is certainly a born well-poisoner, a manipulator of people and a destroyer of things. The whole book revolves around the hero's questions about her. Is Nonie just what normal people are like (only in more tacit ways, by cunning, evasion, or indifference)? And am I like that, too? Maybe the questions are well deferred to the last pages. But a larger evasion haunts the narrative when it can likewise defer any affective response4 to Nonie and her life: she is a force that Wiley cannot begin to grasp, and the same book that keeps pointing to her also leaves her behind as an irritant. If there is honesty in this treatment, it is the honesty of experience undigested and impossible to digest. One feels that the disturbance has been rendered ominous at too early a stage and then left hanging too long. A report of her facte near the end is almost a parody of the modern way with such events in fiction: “Nionie burned to death; I said that, didn't I? A portable heater shorted out; this is what I was told. And she was drunk.”

Wiley has not in fact said it until then, but he might as well have said it, for the telling of his life observes no chronology or associative rhythm. Brodkey puts things in where he feels like putting them; what matters is the sensation from sentence to sentence. Something should be said, therefore, about the prose of The Runaway Soul. The opening paragraph gives a fair impression of Brodkey's strengths and weaknesses:

I was slapped and hurried along in the private applause of birth—I think I remember this. Well, I imagine it anyway—the blind boy's rose-and-mild-and-gray-walled (and salty) aquarium, the aquarium overthrown, the uproar in the woman-barn … the fantastic sloppiness of one's coming into existence, one's early election, one's senses in the radiant and raw stuff of howlingly sore and unexplained registry in the new everywhere, immensely unknown, disbelief and shakenness, the awful contamination of actual light. I think I remember the breath crouched in me and then leaping out yowlingly: this uncancellable sort of beginning.

This is effortful writing, successful to some degree. The fragmentary last phrase is memorable. But what of “private applause” and “the awful contamination of actual light”? Generously strewn throughout the book, such phrases suggest a premeditated striving for effect that allows no space for wonder. One has seen (not in fiction) babies at a moment like the one described by Brodkey, to whom the light was not a contamination. It is rather as if they were looking at the light, considering the medium of light, as far as possible, objectively.

The Runaway Soul has many passages of far less distinction. But even if the most sounded and measured cadences, one's disbelief is often prompted as here: the thing has been gone about with such purposeful eloquence that some imagination is lost. It is different with Wiley's sex—his going half way with boys, in the “oddly exposed, semi-blazing, good-bad time” that adolescence is full of; and, in the chapter called “Ora: New York, 1956,” his going further with a woman. Here the writing finds some savor in each moment:

I twitch, flinch, stiffen in potency of a degree—which I appreciate and am kinged by (as in the last row of a checkerboard)—and am unsteady on, as if on one stilt: this is inside the curious bubble of the reality of having a human potency, somewhat democractically—i.e., more gamblingly, less willed than if I were costumed, angrily brutal for real as playacting, and assertive on my own and without her.

That it is, in that sense, a free erection—as in a free country—and joint—and nice—but, of course, corrupt and based on various deals and inequities, that erects me further—I feel the moments pushing, in a linked way, in a kind of heat of linkage, or with an almost hot, or flame-heated linkage of what might be called sexual effects—the power, says, of her eyes now that they are open and then the exposed breasts as vulnerability and pride and the thing between her legs like the top of the skull of a small cat and stirring catlike: it is a peninsular half-motion in which everything stirs: the wind of the passage of time lifts us, blows, moves—caresses us as if we were dozing on a train and a stranger or all the strangers there were very lightly kissing and stroking and gazing.

Two episodes like this, occupying four hours of real time ten years apart, take up approximately 300 pages of the novel. The exposed tenderness of this way of writing comes from Whitman, and it is managed with narrative consistency and buoyancy—my “half-athletic, pectoralled, sometimes-praised chest.” The vanity, the pride in the gaze, the desire to sustain the reverie and to be seen to sustain it, all these seem part of a “contentiously male” trap. But perhaps Wiley knows that, too.

It is curious to see, in a passage like this, how being touched by a single person, Wiley needs to sharpen the stimulus by imagining many persons. His imagined voyeurs or public sharers are the only crowd that the narrative presents—this, indeed, is a rare scene in having two actually observed characters and not just a nominal two in the mind of one. Apart from a constant combative sensualism with women, and the projection of a wholly passive comradeship, the chief temptation to Wiley's solitude seems to be an ideal of homosexual love. Wiley announces in passing that he is “androgynous”—a wrong choice of word—and acts are mentioned that are not described. The aimless flirtation with this subject is punished by some stretches of overripe prose; Wiley describes his youthful companion Remsen as having

a notion, an idea of actual love-and-friendship between men, something necessary, but something obscure to him—he is partly a man (a young man)—sublimely strong, half-captured, sublimely dangerous—and subject to holy messages (so to speak)—and he had an idea of loneliness—alienation rethought and placed in a suburb—and of despair, acedie—modern and not necessarily Christian but firmly affixed to an idea of God's absence in some physical sense which involved there being just two of them, as on the river—or as in a dream anyway, as I go rushing on—like me on my bike—among trees, in the perspective of the suburb's streets, under the vast, colossally beautiful, truly immense Middle Western sky.

Here “sublimely strong” and “sublimely dangerous” have not been salvaged from cliche; the elaborations (“a notion, an idea”; “loneliness—alienation”), so far from suggesting refinement, come from a want of precise motives and the last few lines are beginning writing, strange to be shown by the author of “Angel.”

The unevenness of the prose in The Runaway Soul relaxes its claim on the reader. This slackening appears in local as well as general effects. The admittedly useful word “thing” is tossed in almost anywhere, up and down the scale of values, as an all-purpose synonym for matter, point, question, obsession, and moral meaning. And the passage from one fictive modre to another takes place on almost sliding a scale: dialogue, soliloquy, flashback, montage, and simple transcription—whole pages composed of strings of sentences uttered by Lila Silenowicz. In some novels of comparable scope you are lost if you fail to read every word. With The Runaway Soul, you are sunk if you try to read every word. The author seems often in a race with himself, but at the same time to be watching the race, and the consequent motion is a ponderous jumble of legs. And yet a certain consistency, partly repellent, partly memorable, does emerge from the deliberate mess of imprecision. The psychology of the hero and the texture of the writing are as continuous as a cocoon.

As an attempt to imagine the lives of people, this book is a monstrous imposition. The same, oddly, does not hold true for its sense of the accidential coherence and chaos in a single life. Thoreau says at the start of a poem: “I am a parcel of vain strivings tied / By chance bonds together, / Dangling this way and that”—and Wiley, and Brodkey, are something like that; not trailing clouds of glory, but dragging a half-sister or soul-ancestor whose name is Nonie. The book ends with a memory of her, ater her actual death, and it ends in the past and the present:

I embraced demon-filth Nonie. She had her arms around killer-trash Wiley. We are insiders. The enmity, the hate, is real. It is very real. We twine arms and legs and necks. These childish hugs of different creatures, the sense of two lives being present—I remember the considerable excellence of how mutual it was despite the disparities in size and mind and state of mind and in the passions and degrees of violence between us … at that time. We know this about each other at this moment of the child's peculiar victory—half-victory; we know this, too. Among the knowledges that were there … We huddle and combine.

Such, one comes to feel, are the relations between an ego and its other selves. Far from the scene are the hopes of fiction for self-knowledge: this is not one of “the knowledges that were there.” To the felicities of art, as to its defeats, Wiley the runaway soul seems at last to have grown indifferent. In the end, this book says, people are what they are. They can think and feel; maybe they can change the shape of their chaoes. But, ultimately, they do not change much. The author includes himself in the judgment, and he does so without a trace of self-satisfaction.