[In the following review, McAlpin views the stories in The World Is the Home of Love and Death as uneven and a disappointing continuation of Brodkey's earlier work.]

Shortly before his death from AIDS in January 1996, Harold Brodkey wrote in his memoir, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, that “I don't expect to be understood. I like what I've written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn't do it.”

Thirty years elapsed between the publication of Brodkey's first collection of stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, in 1958 and his hefty second tome, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode in 1988. Now, posthumously, comes The World Is the Home of Love and Death, Brodkey's final volume of stories.

It is natural to hope for a summing up or coda in an author's swan song, but if it is to be found anywhere in Brodkey's oeuvre, it is in his memoir. This new collection, on the other hand, is a continuation of his life's work, his obsessive, herculean attempt to capture the complex thought processes of minds both in moments of action and in reflections on those moments decades later. To accomplish this, Brodkey interlards multiple perspectives with quick cuts from first- to third-person point of view and from present to past tense. This rarely makes for easy reading.

The mind that most fascinated Brodkey right to the end—which he plumbed exhaustively but never exhausted—was his own. Like his behemoth of a first novel, The Runaway Soul (1991), and much of his second collection, these new stories focus on the author's alter ego, the brilliant but traumatized child genius Wiley Silenowicz, along with his downwardly mobile adoptive parents, S.L. and Lila, and their dysfunctional St. Louis household. Under Brodkey's intense focus, all interactions devolve into minutely observed and analyzed power struggles, usually with sexual undertones. Conversations are fractured into texts and subtexts and sub-subtexts. Brodkey's wit has nothing to do with brevity.

Much of the material will be familiar to his devotees. He revisits the pain of his early childhood: the loss of his mother before he was 2, his life-threatening illnesses, his having been sold for $300 by his biological father to his cousins, who would have made poor candidates for traditional adoption.

“How unreasonable my life seemed moment by moment as I lived it: it was just one puzzle after another. I stare at each moment and wonder what it can mean,” he writes in “Waking,” a reconstruction of his earliest days, sick and mute, with his new mother, who warns him that she is no good at nurturing.

In trying to unscramble the puzzles of his past, Brodkey often treads ground he has covered before, though his new renderings tend to be less shapely and somewhat less accessible than earlier versions. The emotions, however, seem increasingly visceral with each go-round, as if he were attempting to home in ever more closely on the raw essence of experience.

In “Car Buying,” for example, we find the young Wiley suffering in “the pain continuum,” where “painlessness seemed impossibly far away.” From the perspective of his preschool self, he describes in harrowing detail how his older adopted sister Nonie battered and tortured him under his family's porch. For solace, the stitched and bandaged Wiley is taken by his doting but unstable adoptive father to choose a new car for his mother, though it is bound to displease her—events that were already written about in “The Pain Continuum” and “Largely an Oral History of My Mother” in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.

This is not to say that The World Is the Home of Love and Death is redundant. Familiar, sometimes, as well as taxing and difficult, in much the same way that some modern classical music is, it is written for a narrow, appreciative audience willing to immerse itself in its lexicon.

Loyal readers will be moved by Brodkey's insights into love and by confessions such as this from “Religion”: “I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.” They will be surprised and rewarded by the clever, light wordplay of “Spring Fugue,” his happy ode to spring fever in New York City (“April is the duellists' month”), by his penchant for adverbs and by his inventive word combinations that express the desperation of his need to articulate: “quarter-undoored” to describe a four-door sedan missing one door and “male berserkerhood” to describe sexual arousal.

They will also appreciate the additional angles on the Silenowicz family. “Jibber-Jabber in Little Rock” describes 10-year-old Wiley's traumatic stay with Lila's small-minded older brother Simon in Arkansas. It demonstrates once again a child's remarkable ability to survive adversity and even perversity—think of Frank McCourt's trials described in Angela's Ashes—as long as he is master of his own mind.

Sexuality is central to Brodkey. “Lila and S.L.” spins a mating dance between the two in their early 30s, while “Dumbness Is Everything” and “A Guest in the Universe” return to the 1950s and Ora (who was Orra in Brodkey's 1973 story about her first orgasm, “Innocence”).

In the enthralling “Dumbness,” Ora and Wiley are about to have drunken sex on a lawn in Bronxville after a party, while “A Guest” skewers a literary party in New York City. Both stories end abruptly, causing us to wonder whether Brodkey ran out of steam—or time—or merely felt, as he wrote in “Car Buying,” that “[a] story is a brighter substance when it isn't finished, when it is still partly hints and guesses.”

Along with sexuality, illness, death and “the foul inventiveness of pain” are predominant themes. Although AIDS and the author's own mortality aren't addressed directly (and several of the stories predate his 1993 diagnosis), one can't help but wonder about the influence of his illness on his work.

“What I Do for Money” concerns a man dying of an inoperable brain tumor who makes a typical Brodkey declaration: “My life is a mess; yet I am fairly happy. Perhaps unfairly.” Despite some beautiful passages, I found the story fairly—or perhaps unfairly—unmoving. Brodkey also reexamines his adoptive parents' terminal illnesses in their 40s in stories such as “The World Is the Home of Love and Death,” which is so convoluted as to challenge even the most attentive reader.

As with any collection, some stories are more engaging than others. One wishes Brodkey had been given a word limit in “The Bullies,” a 39-page manifesto of innuendo concerning the jockeying for power between Lila and her friend Ida, as observed by the young Wiley. I found myself speculating how such a story would fly if submitted over the transom by an unknown writer.

The World Is the Home of Love and Death reveals Brodkey's curious mix of self-indulgence and almost insane level of discipline. He was “goony with consciousness,” mining his material with Freudian zeal and a disregard for popularity. Who else is going to give us lines such as this: “The inner flush of attitude is unsayable but feelable hotly, like sweat; it has an aroused hearbeat”?