[In the following mixed review, Josipovici considers The Runaway Soul an ambitious but deeply flawed novel.]

Harold Brodkey is a very modern phenomenon. For over twenty years he has been famous in literary circles not so much for what he has written as for what he has been in the process of writing, a massive novel for which publishers have been giving him large advances but which he has been unable or unwilling to finish. Now at last it is out, and we can all decide for ourselves what the emperor's clothes are made of.

Publishers like to think of themselves as having both a hard head for business and a keen eye for literary quality; every now and again, they succumb to the illusion that they have come on a writer who is a genius but also an excellent business proposition. Having seen some of the novel-in-progress, Gordon Lish of Knopf (one of Brodkey's publishers) asserted: “One could take virtually any section of [it], put it into type right now and have a book that would surpass almost everything you and I have ever read.” And, according to the Washington Post, “For years a small clutch of writers and critics not ordinarily given to breathless adoration has compared Brodkey to Freud, Wordsworth and Whitman.” The names of Joyce and Proust have also been invoked, and his fellow American writer, Don DeLillo, has called Brodkey's progress “one of the great brave journeys of American literature”.

The subject of such encomiums seems to take them seriously. In 1986, Brodkey told the Washington Post: “To be possibly not only the best living writer in English, but someone who could be the rough equivalent of a Wordsworth or a Milton is not a role that a half-way educated Jew from St Louis with two sets of parents and a junkman father is prepared to play.” This is nicely disingenuous, the haughty refusal not exactly denying what others have suggested and the autobiographical references passing over the fact that he was educated at Harvard and has worked for the New Yorker for many years.

Brodkey is now over sixty and has so far only published two volumes of stories, First Love and Other Stories and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (published by Cape in England in 1990 as The Abundant Dreamer, the title of the first story—titles are not Brodkey's forte). The pieces which make up the second book date from 1963 to 1975 and were nearly all published in the New Yorker. It is presumably on the strength of these that his reputation has been established, so it is worth looking at them before we turn to the novel.

The Abundant Dreamer is an uneven book. Certainly many less good collections of stories are published and praised every year. But there is nothing, in the first few stories at least, to suggest anything out of the ordinary. This is story-telling as it has, by and large, been practised for the past hundred years:

He was shy, and Ann's boldness was a matter of principle and easier to maintain in speech than in her room. His first visit they spent talking. He said his wife and children were in Indiana for the summer, in a rented cottage on a lake. He went over on weekends. He said it was very pleasant to enjoy “a little harmless feminine companionship” in the evenings. He often grew lonely, he said. On his second visit, there were long silences. On his third, as soon as he entered her sitting room, Ann saw he had made up his mind about her. But he seemed unable to make the first move. Ann said, “I feel a little strange. I think I've been smoking too many cigarettes,” and she lay down on the couch. After a while, Walter tiptoed over and began massaging her forehead. Then Ann kissed him.

The later stories are different. They are more autobiographical, for one thing, and this seems to bring with it a freer, looser kind of writing. Here, for example, is how “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft” begins:

My father is chasing me.

My God, I feel it up and down my spine, the thumping on the turf, the approach of his hands, his giant hands, the huge ramming increment of his breath as he draws near: a widening effort. I feel it up and down my spine and in my mouth and belly—Daddy is so swift: who ever heard of such swiftness?

Plot has gone, to be replaced by sensations: Brodkey dispenses with the clearly defined background and foreground of traditional narrative and pushes us up against experience, trying to convey directly what the child is feeling, his sense of his father's power, the huge disparity of size between them:

My father's face, full of noises, is near: it looms: his hidden face: is that you, old money-maker? My butt is folded on the trapeze of his arm. My father is as big as an automobile.

The technique is not particularly new, of course. The problem is that, however dissatisfied the writer may be with traditional modes of narrative, however much he may want to convey the precise sensations of childhood rather than merely telling us about them, he still only has words and grammar to do it with. Unless he is very careful and very skilful, he runs the risk of conveying nothing at all, except his aching desire to get beyond narrative and language to the raw reality. Note, in the passages quoted above, the preponderance of colons, whose power to signal diminishes the more they are used; note the repetitions—“the approach of his hands, his giant hands”, “My father's face … his hidden face”—which work well enough at first but gradually come to seem like a tic; and note, above all, the way words begin to lose their semantic content without any compensating gain: “the huge ramming increment of his breath … a widening effort”—and, a little lower down the page: “I am being lifted into the air—and even as I pant and stare blurredly, limply, mindlessly … as I hang limply and rise anyway on the fattened bar of my father's arm”.

Nor is Brodkey, at this stage, content to try and recreate sensation instead of recounting it; he has become a theoretician of sensation, an active mistruster of plot: “In most social talk”, he says in the next paragraph, “most politeness, most literature, most religion, it is as if violence didn't exist—except as sin, something far away.” In the pursuit of his theory he is quite prepared to carry his experiment in the recreation of lived experience to outrageous lengths, as in the story “Innocence”. This consists of some thirty close-packed pages which consist almost exclusively of a description of the effort—there is no other word for it—of the protagonist, a poor Jew from St Louis, to give his rich and beautiful New England girlfriend, Orra, an orgasm. No doubt, in the course of all the sweating, the licking, the ebb and flow of anger, tenderness, despair and sheer discomfort, important questions of sexual politics, repression, domination, and so on, are being explored. Even so, it is hard to stay interested. As often with D. H. Lawrence, the relentlessness of it, the lack of humour, the sense of the author's total self-absorption, while intriguing for a page or two, soon begins to pall. As when a stranger buttonholes you and insists you listen to his dreams, surprise and curiosity quickly give way to a desperate boredom.

But is this technique not typical of one major strand of modern literature? Is there not something equally obsessive about Beckett, about Bernhard? No. Those two writers explore obsessiveness, they do not display it. In one sense, their works are giant jokes, at their own expense as well as at the expense of the reader. And they are giant jokes that work because they are made up of an array of tiny jokes, tiny joltings of the reader's expectations, linguistic, ethical and cultural. That is why, for all their obsessiveness, their works are continuously exhilarating.

This is not the case with Brodkey. For all his vaunted originality, he remains very much a New Yorker writer, regularly providing the mystical upbeat ending—against the odds, the stories keep stressing—which is almost obligatory for the genre. Here is how “Innocence” ends:

Sometime earlier, without knowing it, I'd begun to cry. My tears fell on her thighs, her belly, her breasts, as I moved up, along her body, above her, to lie atop her. I wanted to hold her, my face next to hers: I wanted to hold her. I slid my arms in and under her, and she said, ‘Oh Wiley,’ and she tried to lift her arms, but she started to shake again; then, trembling anyway, she lifted her arms and hugged me with a shuddering sternness that was unmistakable; then she began to cry, too.

And here is the ending of “His Son, in His Arms”:

So I turned my face away from the sun—I turned it so it was pressed against my father's neck mostly—and then I knew, in a childish way, knew from the heat (of his neck, of his shirt collar), knew by childish deduction, that his face was unprotected from the luminousness all around us: and I looked; and it was so: his face, for the moment unembarrassedly, was caught in that light. In an accidental glory.

It seems extraordinary that this kind of writing, with its biblical echoes, its emotive repetitions, its straining after a glory and a wisdom it has done nothing to earn—that all this, which is, after all, the staple of romantic fiction, should be taken seriously by anyone, anywhere.

The narrative of Brodkey's life, as it emerges from these stories, is easy to summarize: his mother dies when he is a baby and he is adopted by distant relatives, who already have a daughter of their own. This is St Louis in the early 1930s. In 1944, his adoptive father dies of a stroke and his adoptive mother is soon found to be terminally ill with cancer. Their daughter gets out, leaving him to cope with this demanding and destructive woman. He is a bright boy, good at his studies, and eventually makes it to Harvard, where he meets the beautiful Orra, desired by everyone. It is he who wins her, however, for he is not only bright but also good-looking and sexy. Living with Orra in New York, he starts to write, and to write, of course, about nothing other than his desperate childhood. This is where all the stories, and the novel, end.

It seems that Brodkey discovered quite early on that he really had only one story to tell, his own. No harm in that; great works of literature have grown out of just such a subject. But it is worth noting that both Wordsworth and Proust are as concerned with the relations between then and now, between the childhood they feel drawn to write about and the person who is now doing the writing, as with the simple facts of childhood. This gives a critical edge to their writing which is bound to be missing when the focus is exclusively on the early years.

There is none of this in The Runaway Soul. The “I” who narrates is recognizably the same as the Wiley and Harold of the stories. The facts of his life are the same, though naturally, in over 800 pages, new facts emerge and characters, such as the sister, who are merely mentioned in the stories are here fleshed out. Unlike À la Recherche and The Prelude, there is no sense of any pattern to the life, since there is only a single viewpoint, that of the adolescent narrator. Events happen to him, memories flood his mind, sometimes he pauses to meditate, but that is all. The sister, Norrie, emerges as the most monstrous member of his monstrous family; homosexual as well as heterosexual attractions are recounted in detail, and we hear much, much more about Orra. There is no reason why the book could not have gone on for ever, since, as Tristram Shandy discovered long ago, it takes a great many pages to recount even the tiniest fragment of one's past.

The greatest modernist novels, from À la Recherche to Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi and Yakov Shabtai's Past Continuous, have found a means of sailing between the Scylla of plot and the Charybdis of total plotlessness. Brodkey doesn't even try. He is so sure that what he has to say will be of as much interest to others as it is to himself that he merely digs into the details and keeps going. No wonder he had trouble getting the book finished, and no wonder it doesn't feel finished even now.

The problems which beset the later stories are even more in evidence in The Runaway Soul. The tone moves uneasily from a mocking use of the conventions of the classic novel—one of the chapters is entitled “David Coppermeadow”—to ever more violent attempts to get beyond conventional grammar and syntax, which only reveal an unwitting fall into different conventions (such as the scattering of ellipses):

The faint early morning illumination is shimmying in the room's emptiness when the boybride of grief sits up. I swing my legs over the side of the bed. It's a thing of being alive AFTERWARDS … very stark and clownish. Daddy asked me not to say Kaddish for him: Fuck the Jews … My heart is bad … I have to go bye-bye because the Old Ticker won't work no more … It's all iffy-and-butty for me. …

Brodkey's tendency towards sentimentality becomes even more marked. His dying father is made to say—as, drifting out of sleep, the fourteen-year-old boy recalls it: “You are a hell of a tearing beauty of an adopted kid, you know, even if you are retarded.” Of himself, he says: “I have a kind of harsh courage that I can call up by being not good or sensible but careless—like a naked soldier in a machine-gun fusillade.” Later: “Momma is dying. She is the woman I knew best in the world. I listen to her, when I do listen, with the most comprehension of a certain kind that I can manage with anyone.”

There is, too, much wearisome description of sex, between people of the same or opposite sexes, actual and imagined. “Innocence”, with its mere thirty pages, really does seem innocent now. And when death, sex, or the beastliness of his adoptive family to the hero (though he forgives them all) are not the topics, Brodkey gives us theories about life and art, such as: “My feelings don't fit any grammatical or syntactical model. They do not suggest a requiem.” Or, at greater length:

When memory tries to draw on this stuff, it tends not to use actual moments because in them the stuff of futurity—which is in every actual moment—makes memory stagger and stammer around as the mind did at the time in the face of, in the light of what you can't know about what then happens next.

The abrupt truth of reality remembered is ignorance all over again.

Pointlessness for me then is waiting for the point to be made, the blade to appear, and I'm humiliated or scared or empty or all of those then, or I manage to be gallant on the chopping block, at the sight of the materializing act—enmity, judgement, the point—and my opinion of it then, at the last minute …

There is no doubting Brodkey's ambition. Even if we didn't have his word for it in interviews, The Runaway Soul clearly stakes out a claim to be considered a major artistic achievement. Ambition, of course, is central to the artistic life, but it is fraught with ambiguities. One can easily understand the ambition of the budding politician to become Prime Minister, or that of the budding athlete to win the Olympic Games. But what exactly is the goal of artistic ambition?

There is no doubting the ambition to surpass ancient models in Virgil, Dante and Milton Schoenberg commented that with the invention of serialism he had ensured the dominance of German music for the next hundred years. Picasso, as early as 1900, could scrawl over a drawing: “I, the King”. Dante, in the Commedia, builds into his poem the tension between a legitimate pride in his achievement and the need, as a man, for humility. But then what exactly is it that he is proud of? It is easy enough to see that the politician who fails to become Prime Minister and the athlete who fails to win the Olympics have both failed in the goals they set themselves. But when has the artist failed? Do we call Mozart a failure? Kafka?

The fact is that ambition in art, while as strong a motive as in politics or sport, seems to be subject to no external and public system of evaluation. In the end it seems to be the ambition to become truly oneself, and to earn the respect of those one respects—the dead as well as the living. And it seems to be bound up both with a clear-sighted assessment of one's own possibilities and with a profound understanding of what constitutes the best in the art that already exists. Part of what we admire in Borges, Sciascia and Muriel Spark, is their sense of what they can and cannot do. At the same time, of course, no roads are ever entirely closed in art. No sprinter would dream of running the marathon, but who would have thought, on the strength of his early work, that Perec had it in him to write La Vie mode d'emploi? Yet that work grew under his hands, became what it is through inner necessity, skill, hard work and good luck.

Once upon a time, the pressures on writers were exerted by patrons and governments. Today, they are exerted by money and the possibility of instant fame. The best artists cope with this, as they have always coped with external pressures. The lesser ones succumb, as they have always done. The Runaway Soul seems to have become what it is through a mixture of self-absorption, the desire to write the Great American Novel, and the need of publishers and the media for just such a work, and that is not the recipe for good art.